TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 100, September2018

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial: September 2018

SCIENCE FICTION

Her Monster, Whom She Loved
Vylar Kaftan

Harry and Marlowe and the Secret of Ahomana
Carrie Vaughn

The Last to Matter
Adam-Troy Castro

How to Become a Robot in 12 Easy Steps
A. Merc Rustad

The Explainer
Ken Liu

Hard Mary
Sofia Samatar

NPC
Charles Yu

Stone Wall Truth
Caroline M. Yoachim

Travelling into Nothing
An Owomoyela

Frontier ABCs: The Life and Times of Charity Smith, Schoolteacher
Seanan McGuire

They Go Bump
David Barr Kirtley

FANTASY

Abandonware
Genevieve Valentine

Jump
Cadwell Turnbull

The Coin of Heart’s Desire
Yoon Ha Lee

You Pretend Like You Never Met Me, and I’ll Pretend Like I Never Met You
Maria Dahvana Headley

Conspicuous Plumage
Sam J. Miller

A Brief Guide to the Seeking of Ghosts
Kat Howard

Elena’s Egg
Theodora Goss

The Super Ultra Duchess of Fedora Forest
Charlie Jane Anders

The Girl with the Sun in Her Head
Jeremiah Tolbert

EXCERPTS

Gene Doucette | The Spaceship Next Door
Gene Doucette

NONFICTION

A Few of Our Favorite Things
Wendy N. Wagner

Book Reviews: September 2018
Arley Sorg

Media Reviews: September 2018
Jenn Reese

Interview: John Joseph Adams
Christian A. Coleman

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Vylar Kaftan

Genevieve Valentine

Carrie Vaughn

Cadwell Turnbull

Adam-Troy Castro

Maria Dahvana Headley

Ken Liu

Sofia Samatar

Sam J. Miller

Kat Howard

MISCELLANY

Coming Attractions

Stay Connected

Subscriptions and Ebooks

Support Us on Patreon or Drip, or How to Become a Dragonrider or Space Wizard

About the Lightspeed Team

Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

© 2018 Lightspeed Magazine

Cover by Galen Dara

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Editorial: September 2018

John Joseph Adams | 464 words

Welcome to Lightspeed’s 100th issue!

To celebrate this milestone, we decided to publish a super-sized issue, with ten original stories—more than twice the amount of original fiction than usual—plus ten reprints and some special nonfiction to boot. And to make things even more commemorative, the vast majority of our fiction in this issue, both original and reprint, is from our most frequently published fiction contributors—the Lightspeediest writers to ever Lightspeed. It’s a distillation of what we’re made of, and we’re beyond excited to share it with all of you.

Our cover art this month comes from Hugo award-winning artist (and fifty-three-time Lightspeed illustrator) Galen Dara, illustrating new science fiction from Vylar Kaftan: “Her Monster, Whom She Loved.” We also have new SF from Carrie Vaughn (“Harry and Marlowe and the Secret of Ahomana”), Adam-Troy Castro (“The Last to Matter”), Ken Liu (“The Explainer”), and Sofia Samatar (“Hard Mary”), plus reprints from A. Merc Rustad (“How to Become a Robot in 12 Easy Steps”), Charles Yu (“NPC”), Caroline M. Yoachim (“Stone Wall Truth”), An Owomoyela (“Travelling Into Nothing”), Seanan McGuire (“Frontier ABCs: The Life and Times of Charity Smith, Schoolteacher”), and David Barr Kirtley (“They Go Bump”).

On the fantasy side of the ledger, we’re featuring new work from Maria Dahvana Headley (“You Pretend Like You Never Met Me, and I’ll Pretend Like I Never Met You”), Cadwell Turnbull (“Jump”), Genevieve Valentine (“Abandonware”), Sam J. Miller (“Conspicuous Plumage”), and Kat Howard (“A Brief Guide to the Seeking of Ghosts”), plus we have reprints from Yoon Ha Lee (“The Coin of Heart’s Desire”), Theodora Goss (“Elena’s Egg”), Charlie Jane Anders (“The Super Ultra Duchess of Fedora Forest”), and Jeremiah Tolbert (“The Girl with Sun in Her Head”).

Our nonfiction includes an interview, as per usual, but for this special celebratory issue, our staff twisted my arm into letting them interview someone you’ve seen a lot in these pages over the years but never heard directly from in the form of an interview: me. (I tried to demur, but they insisted!) Otherwise: for a change of pace, our media review is a look at recent video games with a speculative bent, and then of course we’ve got author spotlights with our original fiction writers and a book review column from Arley Sorg. We’re also pleased to feature a special celebration of our contributors’ and staff members’ favorite Lightspeed stories of all-time, and then our novel excerpt this month is from Gene Doucette’s The Spaceship Next Door.

Well, that’s all there is to report this month. Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy this celebratory super-sized issue, and here’s to the next hundred!

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 twelve times) and is a eight-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.

Her Monster, Whom She Loved

Vylar Kaftan | 1820 words

Ammuya birthed five hundred gods, followed by a monster. That was her first mistake. The gods tormented the monster because they feared it. They bound it inside a black hole, and the monster’s hatred seethed. Eventually the monster raged so fiercely he escaped the event horizon. Then he hunted down his siblings, one by one.

On a silent desert planet, Ammuya cried for her children. Her brave warrior-son: slain on a red giant’s surface. Her brilliant astronomer-daughter: struck down in her starry palace. Her gentle son of the solar winds: dead in her arms. She cried until the sun burned away her tears. Only she and the monster remained.

Then the monster turned on her.

Her child transformed to a tentacled dragon: darker than vacuum, hotter than supernova. She shifted into a massive millipede, whose segments sprayed toxic waste. The two wrestled, evenly matched, like binary stars locking each other in orbit. The dragon charred her legs, but Ammuya channeled her pain. Rage became strength. She could never forget her other children, murdered by this one. She ignited with grief. Her light blinded the monster; her spray disintegrated its limbs. The dragon’s howl shook the galaxy. With its last strength, it curled inward to heal itself, a motionless ouroboros.

Ammuya saw her chance. She could strike and slay the monster forever—avenging her other children. Yet she circled through space, watching him heal. He looked like he was sleeping. Like he had before he murdered the gods. She could not strike her sleeping child, yet uncounted creatures would die if she failed. She steeled herself; no one else could destroy him.

But now: too late. The dragon collapsed like a dying star. Lightning crackled from its shattered scales, and blue feathers sprouted through the gaps. It resurrected into an electric phoenix with wings of light. It siphoned matter from the nearest system, obliterating a trillion species. Thirty potentially spacefaring civilizations were wiped out like simple algae.

Cursing her weakness, Ammuya transformed to a sleek otter-hawk and fled. The monster chased her through a dusty nebula, its claws swiping her feet. It chased her past a red giant swallowing its own system. It chased her through the war-torn galaxy, its populated planets vibrating with passing terror. Her child gained power as he digested his siblings. She could not face his nightmare strength.

She took refuge in a quantum black hole—where he might look for her or not, and neither state mattered. She became a salamander cat. Licking her wounds, she regrew her limbs until they trailed behind her like stardust. She grew seventeen eyes, one for each of the galaxies’ gifts, and wondered what to do. She could not let her child destroy the universe. Yet she pitied him, monster that he’d become.

Ammuya curled inside herself, meditating for the thirty seconds she needed to analyze the situation. In her resting state, she called upon universal wisdom. She radiated to the people of this galaxy, who proved numerous and unaware of each other. She fluctuated with the colors of HELP, and slowly their lives fortified her, strengthening her powers. As always, some beings worshipped her, and some chose her child. She grew forcefully, devouring suns where life had once existed but gone.

All this knowledge—yet she saw no option but killing her child. Ammuya cried. Her tears flowed through space, then faded to dust. Vacuum overwhelmed even a goddess’s tears.

• • • •

Ammuya gathered her strength. From ten dying stars, she took their cores, renewing her immortality. From thirteen pulsars, she took regularities and eccentricities, to make her tactics reliable yet unpredictable. And from the nearest quasar, she took hot flame. She crafted a burning lasso to help capture her child.

The people’s prayers were what she most needed—their belief and their support. Their power was not a force of physics like gravity or energy. Physical forces allowed her actions; belief allowed her existence. Her strength depended on the millions of sentient species in the universe.

Next Ammuya built her shields; she pulled the event horizons from a black hole and pressed it into a sphere: a jet-black shield should her child discover her. Her poor child, who had distorted inside his prison. She blamed herself—that millennium she’d spent singing him lullabies in a lifeless galaxy. Where he slept, after he’d devoured sixteen worlds and an intelligent population of trillions.

He’d been born this way, somehow. His birth had been different; she stayed linked to him in a way she had not with her others. When he burst from her, all her anger drained into him. That made him what he was. A monster, a weapon of pure hatred—a galaxy-breaker. That was why she failed to strike: He had stolen her power.

At his birth, she’d seen no option; he had to be controlled. Yet she had never wished his torture. She could not stop her children once they had captured the monster. Their torments only strengthened his evil. Ammuya grieved for her children, her five hundred beautiful creatures and all their accomplishments. She grieved for her monster, who had never known anything else, who never had the chance to be better. She loved her monster, but his crimes were unbearable. He would destroy the universe—including himself—unless she stopped him.

She landed on a barren red planet to gather her strength. She deployed her black shield around its exosphere and meditated while her powers grew. Trillions prayed to her under billions of names. She drew their thoughts into her core and brightened like a newborn star.

The monster came unexpectedly, long before she could brace herself. Still a phoenix, he tore through the shield like it was stardust. He clawed her neck. She shrieked as her blood stained across light-years. Ammuya lassoed him with starfire, but he shrugged the coils off. He laughed at her attempt.

She darted away, taking refuge between atoms in a distant asteroid belt. She cried out with a voice so strong it rearranged the surrounding rocks. My child, my beloved, please cease. We are the only two left.

He hissed through the void, then took shape as a sulfuric cloud. He dissolved a thousand asteroids. His supporters prayed; they made war on their worlds, destroying all creation. Their hateful prayers expanded him, exciting his molecules towards further chaos. He spoke like a supernova. I will never forgive.

Her guilt overwhelmed her; she had no innocence here. She had not saved him from his siblings. But she must try reason. Let us work together. Let us rebuild.

He broke the atomic bonds where she hid. The asteroids exploded. He chased and she fled again, her heart heavy with what they’d done. Four thousand solar systems died that day, vaporized in their wake. Ten trillion voices cried out their deaths and vanished. The loss wrecked Ammuya’s heart. But when she finally escaped into the heart of a neutron star, she grieved more for her child, whom she’d birthed and nurtured. Her monster, whom she loved.

The star protected her while she wept. Her tears seeded life on a million new planets. Over time these tears would evolve, each to their own dead end—as bacteria exposed to radiation, or as advanced life forms that poisoned their planet. There was no telling which seeds would sprout or how long they would last, but they were born of her misery and destined to tragedy.

• • • •

When she had grieved long enough to regain control, she had no solution. Her shields could not withstand the monster; her useless lasso was destroyed. She had only one desperate idea.

She made a new shield. Instead of black-hole negation, she crafted with bright starlight. She persuaded the light to align itself; she taught each uncertain quark where it was and how fast it was moving. Her shield became a shining raiment befitting the queen of the universe. Ammuya transformed to a mother eagle-kin with golden wings like an angel. She clad herself in the translucent garb, which shaped to her body, and hid it with starry armor.

But the garb was a distraction. She built her deepest shield with a thought. Then she called out. My child. Come to me.

The expanding edges of the universe paused with her plea. The monster heard, as she knew he would. He charged from three galaxies away, through their ravaged stars and planetary debris. A serpent now, his simplest form—a mouth to devour all things.

Ammuya shone from within her neutron star. She called to the monster, radiating her words through the electromagnetic spectrum. My child, I failed you.

He reared to strike. His scales emitted gamma rays; his presence decayed all things. When he unhinged his jaw, his mouth spewed the wreckage of planets. Ammuya held up one talon to draw his attention. She said, I give myself to you.

Her armor fell like meteorites. Light dispersed into the vacuum. She, the monster’s mother, stood nearly naked before him.

The monster bit her unprotected face. Poison raced through her body. Ammuya shrieked and crumpled; her scream altered evolution on a thousand nearby planets. The monster shredded her wings, scattering her into photons. With a howl, he reached her true shield: the one she had built to destroy them both.

He broke her.

She said, I love you.

She flared like a supernova. Her shield ignited; a shield he could never shatter. She transformed his power and amplified back at him. She immersed him in love. He could not stop it; he could not reject nor defy it.

With an injured howl, he spasmed into blackness. He writhed, rending the galaxy into antimatter; he chain-reacted until he could explode no more. He transformed into an ever-shifting fractal being, composed of every intelligence in the galaxy. He could not see himself without seeing his mother; he could not harm anyone without being loved.

He wept for his crimes, for his siblings, for his dying mother.

I am sorry, he said plainly. I could not understand.

I know, she said, because we are the same. I am a monster, too. We are both divine monsters.

What happens now? he asked. I cannot help but love what I see. How do I keep it from hurting me?

Ammuya had little time before her rupture. She shrank into herself, deleting her particles until nothing remained. It will always hurt, she replied.

He shimmered his confusion. I am wiser now. How do I atone?

Love them, she said, echoing with starlight.

His frequencies harmonized with hers. She superimposed herself with her child in a quantum state. For a moment they occupied two places at once, yet remained the same being. As they had always been—as all existence is one.

She collapsed and died. With a bang, she gave her child a new universe.

©2018 by Vylar Kaftan. | Art © 2018 by Galen Dara.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Vylar Kaftan won a Nebula for her alternate history novella “The Weight of the Sunrise.” Her new novella “Her Silhouette, Drawn in Water” is forthcoming from Tor Books in 2019. She’s published about 40 short stories in Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, and other places. Her Nebula-nominated story, “I’m Alive, I Love You, I’ll See You in Reno” launched Lightspeed.

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

Harry and Marlowe and the Secret of Ahomana

Carrie Vaughn | 10,000 words

Wine-dark sea? No, the water was black as tar when the Kestrel crashed into it.

The storm came up so suddenly, they might have hit a wall. It proved too massive for the airship to try to fly around, or over—it could only ascend so high, and the storm reached higher. They stayed aloft as long they could with a torn bladder and damaged engine, searching for some spit of sand to alight on. The lightning seemed to flash green around them. They jettisoned all the ballast well before they finally hit the water. But they managed to reach that spit of sand.

The wreckage spread out for a mile along the beach. The bladder’s fabric was shredded; the gondola was smashed, scattering wooden spars and brass bands, hooks and rails, cabinets and boxes.

Come daylight, Harry sat exhausted on the sand looking over it all. She might have been Maud, Princess of Wales and granddaughter to Queen Victoria, but the storm didn’t care. A slight breeze played with her hair, which had come loose from its bun. Her clothing was dry, but stiffened with salt water, and her shirt was ripped on one shoulder. She needed to salvage what she could—instruments, food, water, rope, weapons.

During the crash, she had kept hold of two things: the strongbox containing the Aetherian artifacts they’d collected, and Marlowe. The only things that mattered. She turned back to the rough shelter she’d been able to erect, where the injured man lay.

She had not seen the exact moment it had happened, whether he’d been struck by flying debris or had fallen. He’d been at the helm, leaning his whole body to the wheel to keep the rudder up, to keep them airborne against the hellish wind. She’d been working the pumps by hand after the engines died, trying to put more gas into the bladders. Then the whole gondola turned upside down—

And they plummeted.

Now, Marlowe lay on a still-damp stretch of grass—the best Harry had been able to do for him. She’d bound the wound on his head and was fairly sure the bleeding had stopped, but he still hadn’t woken. She didn’t think he had any broken bones or worse injuries, but she couldn’t be sure—and why wouldn’t he regain consciousness? His breathing was shallow; his hands were cold. He needed water. He needed a hospital. Alas, they were in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Somewhere.

“Marlowe,” she whispered, touching his face. “Do wake up. Please.”

His lips pursed, and he moaned a little, which was such a vast improvement that she smiled. Harry squeezed his hand, then went to find water.

• • • •

She made three trips along the beach, each time hauling armloads of detritus back to the shelter. Using lengths of torn fabric from the bladder, she created a lean-to to keep the sun and further rain off Marlowe. Using wrecked timbers, she built a fire.

She found a machete and a utility knife, a waterlogged rifle that might or might not be salvageable, a compass, a tin cup, a shattered bottle of brandy, and two semaphore flags—the ones for “negative” and the letter “C.” She did not find either of the two casks of drinking water they’d kept aboard the Kestrel, but she did find some fruit growing nearby. It would serve. She cut up and mashed several papaya into a cup and produced some liquid, which she brought to Marlowe’s cracked lips.

“Marlowe, just a sip. You must drink something.”

He made that small, ill moan again, with a slight working of his lips. She poured a few drops past them, and he seemed to swallow. He let out a sigh, took another breath, and another.

• • • •

Harry piled together surviving pieces of Aetherian machinery from the Kestrel. Remains of the wireless transmitter were among them. She did not know if there was enough left to repair. The maps were gone, not that she would have been able to find their location if she’d had them. They had been en route from Honolulu to Shanghai, a long but relatively straightforward ocean passage. The storm had blown them hundreds of miles off course. They could be anywhere, and were very likely far out of reach of any passing ships, aerial or marine.

Marlowe grew feverish. Harry changed the bandages on his head. The wound was black and crusted, and she longed for fresh water to clean it with. She ought to move inland, to search for a spring.

On the second morning, she went to the beach and found footprints that were not her own. The person who’d made them appeared to have come down from the jungle and walked some ways along the sand, stopping in several places to survey the wreckage. The owner of the prints had a small foot, a long stride. Harry immediately set about dismantling and cleaning the rifle, but she feared it was useless. The charging cartridge was drained and the circuitry corroded with salt water. The thing was meant to be weather proof, not waterproof. Not that a conventional gunpowder rifle would have survived the crash, but one might have hoped the Aetherian-derived weapon would hold up a bit better.

She buried the strongbox containing the artifacts she and Marlowe had collected over the last months. Their prizes. The mound of sand marking the spot was nestled among the roots at the base of a palm tree. They would be safe there, she hoped.

She surveyed what she could of the island from the beach. It didn’t seem terribly large, but a tall, conical volcano occupied the middle of it, likely dormant given the dense green jungle climbing to its peak. Each afternoon, clouds gathered around it like airships coming to rest, and a brief rain fell. She collected some of the rainwater and gave it to Marlowe to drink; it was not enough.

In other circumstances she would be eager to explore, but those footprints had given her the feeling of being under siege.

• • • •

On the afternoon after Harry had first found the footprints, Marlowe blinked to wakefulness for a short time.

“Marlowe!” She rushed to his side, fell into the grass, and took his hand.

He squinted at her. “You’re blurry,” he murmured.

“You’ve been badly hurt.”

“That explains it . . .”

“Don’t move, please rest.”

“Where are we?”

“I don’t know. An island.”

“Harry . . .”

“Just rest, that’s all you need do at the moment. I’ll take care of us.”

He fell unconscious again. The skin of his face blazed with heat. His hairline was dampened with sweat.

She was able to make something resembling a water bladder from a salvaged leather aeronaut coat; then, collecting her weaponry, she set off into the trees, searching for fresh water.

• • • •

Harry found a shallow, mossy pool filled with ground water that probably seeped up through the surrounding volcanic rock. Tediously, she strained moss and dirt from the pool through fabric torn from her shirt, and collected it in the leather coat. A gallon or two, perhaps. She knotted the top closed, and walked very carefully back to keep from dropping the awkward load.

While she had not seen any sign of other people during her trek, she imagined she was being watched. She didn’t breathe easy again until she saw Marlowe and confirmed that he was alone and alive.

Finally she could give him plenty of water and clean what she could of the wound, which didn’t bleed but had swollen alarmingly, becoming bruised and purplish. The fever was worse, and he murmured deliriously about someone named Richard, who must be furious, and how he would never go back. She prompted him, trying to learn more—trying to draw a coherent phrase from him. “Who is Richard? Why is he furious?”

He replied, “They can think what they like of me, for I am most ashamed of them,” and then slipped into another wracked sleep.

“Oh, Marlowe, I don’t know what to do,” she said, resting a hand on his arm, scrubbing a soreness from her eyes. She lay down—just for a moment, just to rest—and fell asleep slumped partway on Marlowe’s bed of grass, her head pillowed near his shoulder.

• • • •

The third day dawned, and though she did not want to attract the attention of whoever lived there, she resolved to set the whole mountain on fire if it would draw possible rescue to them.

She knelt by Marlowe’s pallet and set another damp cloth on his head. He didn’t wake, not even a little, and wouldn’t swallow the water she offered.

“Marlowe?” She leaned her head on his shoulder as she choked on a sob. “Please, stay with me,” she murmured.

She didn’t hear it when the intruders approached, their steps on the sand careful and silent. They came up the beach, enough of them to form a crowd around the edge of her camp.

At least, it seemed like a crowd to her addled mind. In truth, there were only six or seven, but she couldn’t seem to take them all in. They filled the space around her.

Grabbing the rifle, she took a defensive stance over Marlowe’s pallet. The motion had an air of desperation to it, and her voice came out more panicked than she’d intended. “Back! Stay back!” She belatedly remembered the rifle didn’t work, but perhaps they wouldn’t realize that.

A woman from the group stepped forward, her hand out in a universal gesture of calm. Harry’s heart raced; she was not calm.

The strangers were brown-skinned, of Polynesian extraction, with black hair, long and full—even the men’s. They had broad noses, dark eyes. Several were stocky, with powerful bodies; others were lean and graceful. They wore robes of a light woven fabric, in dark blues and reds, batik printed.

They would kill both her and Marlowe in short order, she was sure. She’d failed, very decidedly.

“Get away from us,” Harry muttered.

The woman spoke in a language Harry had never heard before. Harry wet her lips and shook her head. The woman tried again, monosyllables. Harry didn’t lower the rifle; it was all she had.

Several of them, including the woman, held staves of some kind. They were metallic, pale bronze, with a texture that twisted around itself, as if cast in the shape of vines. At the heads were a crystalline structure, facets held in place by wires, and within those facets glowed a haunting green light, otherworldly and very familiar.

Aetherian.

Here, at the farthest corner of the globe, an Aetherian component Harry had never before seen.

Then the woman said, “Parlez-vous francais?”

Harry let out a shocked burst of laughter. “Oui. Oui, je parle francais.” Some of the islands in the region were French colonies. Of course.

The woman smiled gently.

Harry’s cheeks burned with tears. “Au secours. Please. We need help.”

She gestured back to Marlowe, and in so doing dropped the rifle, then fell to her knees. She simply couldn’t stand any longer.

• • • •

The next few hours were strange. Two of the woman’s companions went to Marlowe’s side, and Harry’s instinctive reaction was to pull them away, to protect him. But as she well knew, there was nothing she could do.

The woman knelt by Harry and said, “It’s all right. We will help.”

Harry stared at the glowing head of the woman’s staff. It pulsed, green charges passing along intricate wires. She had so many questions, but her tongue was stuck in her mouth.

It took some time to mount a procession. They had a litter with them, as if they’d known they’d need to carry an injured body, and carefully arranged Marlowe on it. They had some method of coaxing water down his throat. Leaving Marlowe to the care of strangers was the most difficult thing Harry had ever done.

They offered Harry the use of a second litter, but she insisted on walking. She took one last look over the camp. The islanders hadn’t found the strongbox, and Harry left it in place.

They made a slow procession inland. The woman invited Harry to walk with her in the lead, but Harry stayed by the litter. Marlowe seemed to wake once, groaning as he squinted into the canopy of trees above. His bearers moved a touch more gently after that. Harry pressed his shoulder whenever their path was wide enough to allow her to walk alongside.

“It will be all right,” the woman said. “You must trust us.”

How? she wanted to demand. “What is your name?” she asked instead.

“My name is Moea,” she said, and was too polite to ask for Harry’s name in return. Harry was being churlish in not offering it, but she didn’t know how else to be just now.

They must have walked an hour when the group stopped. Harry looked around for a village, open-air huts in a clearing, but saw only the continuing stretch of jungle. Moea and one of the men came forward, and at a silent nod between them, touched the crystals of their staves to the air in a pattern that must have had some meaning.

Then, all was revealed.

The points they had touched were part of a gate, two pillars of stone that had heretofore been invisible. When triggered, the air before the gates wavered, and some kind of camouflaging screen parted in a shimmer of heat. Beyond it stood a city. An entire city, occupying the valley at the base of the volcano.

Harry stared, astonished, as the procession moved past her.

“I thought . . . the island appears to be nothing but jungle . . . nothing at all.”

“That is what we want people to think,” Moea said, smiling with obvious pride.

“But how?”

Moea indicated her staff. “You keep looking at this. I think you know what this means.”

“Aetherians. You have Aetherian technology.”

“We will save your friend’s life. Come.”

Past that invisible wall, Harry saw vaguely familiar details—palm trees that had been trained to grow perfectly straight made a fence. Wires joined the living fence posts, and transmitters were placed on the top—these conducted a glowing green energy, and this must have been the source of the shield, an Aetherian-generated charge protecting what lay within. British prisons and the military used such Aetherian-powered energy barriers. But Harry had never seen anything like this.

“How is any of this possible?” she asked Moea.

“The wisdom of our mothers and fathers, and the gifts they received, has built all this.”

“But—” She was going to say it was not possible, but the evidence before her clearly said it was. Unless she and Marlowe had died and were now entering some kind of hell. Or heaven, unlike any promised by any sermon.

The city’s streets were paved with pale stones, lending a pleasant brightness to the place. Everybody walked. Once or twice Harry saw something like rickshaws, carts that held one passenger while another person pushed, but only the elderly or injured seemed to ride in them.

Terraced buildings made of wood, palm, and stone climbed up the side of the volcano, and every flat surface seemed packed with planters, blooming trees and dripping flowers. The gardens were a haven for nectar-drinking birds and butterflies which flitted like living jewels. This place was unreal, some artist’s ideal of an island paradise. Some hazy painting of a mythological scene.

The stone in the streets, though clean, was worn. The depressions of thousands of footsteps wearing the path were evident. The buildings had accreted, additional floors and terraces added. It all gave the impression of a crystal growing over time.

How much time? How long had they been here? And how long had they been under Aetherian influence? She saw lanterns by doorways that used Aetherian filaments. Aetherian pumps attached to wooden pipes carried water to upper floors. Harry had not been able to get a closer look at the staves Moea and the others carried. She stole glances, and saw only that the mechanisms within the wire-wrapped crystals were small, and alien.

The procession climbed steps and sloped pathways until it entered a long stone house, an open space with a low ceiling and curtained windows overlooking a narrow channel of water. There were several low pallets in back, and many planters hanging along a wall, filled with ferns, flowers, orchids. The islanders set the litter on one of the pallets and a crowd of people got to work, stripping Marlowe of his bloody, sweat dampened clothes, washing him with sea sponges.

Harry wanted to call out that she’d done her best, she knew he was in terrible shape but she’d done everything she could to help him. She had tried so, so hard. As if that made up for failure.

Their ministrations came to focus on his head, with poking, prodding, an examination not just of the wound but of his entire skull. There seemed to be a leader of the group, a slender, older man—a doctor? He muttered a few orders, and one of his assistants opened a cupboard in the wall, revealing more equipment. Harry was entranced.

The doctor put some kind of mask over Marlowe’s face, a thing made of wood and metal connected to a pair of tubes leading to a humming device that might have been a pump. The mask was solid and completely enclosed his nose and mouth.

Harry snapped. “He can’t breathe—take it off, he won’t be able to breathe!”

Moea put a hand on Harry’s arm. “It will breath for him. It is providing him with pure oxygen, which will ease his lungs and brain, helping him to heal. Do you understand?”

The Kestrel used a similar pump to feed gas into its balloon. Marlowe’s chest continued to rise and fall—if anything, the rhythm of his breathing became more deep and steady, not so rushed and shallow. But with the mask over his face, the Aetherian-derived tubes and wires coming off him, he looked . . . inhuman. Moea’s people placed more devices near his head, attached more tubes. One of the doctors held a very thin, very fine knife—then touched it lightly to Marlowe’s skull. A sudden gout of blood gushed into a bowl.

“Marlowe!” she cried, pulling against Moea’s grip.

“Mademoiselle. You must rest. Your friend is safe now, please trust us.” She gestured to one of her companions, who brought over a cup made of some kind of gourd. “Drink this, please.”

Like a kind nursemaid from her childhood, Moea guided the cup to her lips, and like a child, Harry drank. Her lips were so parched, her mind scattered. It wasn’t water, it wasn’t juice. Or not just juice. It appeared to be medicinal. Poisoned, her paranoia said. They would suffocate Marlowe, they would poison her, they would find the strongbox, and all was lost.

Her vision blurred, her head tilted. She couldn’t focus, and then she couldn’t stand at all. She did not remember falling; only that she floated into darkness, and she had to assume that someone caught her.

• • • •

When her oldest brother Eddy—Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence—died, it had been just like this. All panic, all helplessness, Mother not even complaining, just crying, and Father slumped in his chair like he had somehow failed, while Eddy writhed with infection and finally slipped away. George, “the spare,” became very serious indeed, determined to shoulder all the responsibility of moving forward. Then the same thing happened to Father. Two heirs gone in as many years, and the whole country looked to some conspiracy, some poison released by the country’s reliance on alien technology. But no one would stop using airships to fly to the continent, or Aetherian-powered trains to travel swiftly and cleanly.

Harry entered adulthood vowing to take on some of the burden that had settled on her family. The alien craft had crashed in Surrey the same year of her birth—she was a child of this new world, and she would understand the new technology of the Aetherian Revolution. She would bend it to her will.

But sometimes people just died. Despite all one’s will and effort. Sometimes there was simply nothing one could do.

She awoke on a clean pallet, with crisp clean sheets made of some soft fiber—bamboo, perhaps. She was washed and wearing a loose tunic; her dark hair was also clean and brushed over her shoulder. The pallet was in an open-air room, raised at the corner of some larger complex: a courtyard, with a trickling fountain and channels of water. She could see the ocean from here, threads of white surf brushing against the distant, sandy beach. A large-winged seabird soared overhead.

She did not know how long Moea’s potion had made her sleep. How many days she’d lost.

The windows overlooked a long drop to jungle below. Harry had a thought that she should try to escape, but quickly realized she was far too tired to consider it.

As soon as Moea appeared at the far side of the courtyard, Harry went to her. “Marlowe, where is he?”

“He is resting,” she said. She was taller than Harry—statuesque, imperious. Harry would not be intimidated.

“I want to see him. I want to see how all of this is possible.”

“All of what?”

“This—your Aetherian technology.”

“Aetherian—this is what you call the work of the teacher from the sky?”

“The teacher—” Harry fell speechless.

“You have many questions,” Moea said, clearly amused, and Harry bristled at the condescension. “First, come see your friend, so you will be assured we mean you no harm.”

Moea led her through the courtyard to a path made with basalt paving stones. Trees formed a canopy overhead. They turned next to a room that was darker and more sheltered than the rest, and there lay Marlowe, next to a brazier that glowed with Aetherian energy, keeping a space of controlled warmth around him. Better than a blanket, the brazier made the room dry and comfortable. Marlowe lay clean and cushioned, nude but for a sheet pulled up to his chest. He was breathing easily, steadily. The mask they had put on his face earlier was gone.

“James,” she murmured, and ran to his side, taking up his hand. It was cool, limp.

His head showed scarring, some of it rough—likely from the original injury—but some of it very fine, as if from surgery. Part of his hair had been shaved away. The skin around the wound was healthy pink, and the horrifying swelling was now gone. She brushed his cheek, longed to do more, but was afraid to disturb him. Her relief made her weak, and she could not stand to face their benefactor.

“He will sleep for some time yet. His injuries were grave—bleeding inside his skull made his brain swell. He will be a long time healing.”

“But he will heal,” Harry said.

“Yes.”

Harry murmured, “I don’t know how to thank you enough. Merci mil boucoup. My name is . . . my name is Maud,” she said, not realizing until she spoke it which name she was going to use. Maud—pretense stripped away, which was exactly how she felt. And Harry had not been much use at all, had she?

• • • •

The islanders had a system for caring for the invalid, feeding him a warm gruel that slipped down his throat, cleaning him and his bedding, all without unduly disturbing him. Moea was right—he slept deeply for days. Harry stayed at Marlowe’s side, sleeping on and off, eating. Without realizing it, she had starved herself, those few days on the beach.

On Harry’s third day in the city, Moea appeared at the sickroom and asked her if she would like a tour of Ahomana. It was the name of both the city and the island.

“You wish to know what makes all this possible,” Moea said. “There is a furnace that drives all we do here. I will show you.”

Moea and several attendants—or perhaps guards; they had no obvious weapons—led her down the pathways to the center of the city.

Islanders leaned out of windows or stopped to stare at her—and why shouldn’t they? She was the only outsider in the city, apart from Marlowe. She might have expected them to show fear, awe, wonder—but they only revealed frank curiosity. Moea waved at onlookers, who went back to whatever it was they’d been doing. Harry felt a little disappointed; they might have shown a bit more interest in her.

In the city center, they crossed a wide plaza. A fire pit lined with slate marked the middle of the space, and palm trees around the perimeter offered shade. Moea explained that this was where the city gathered for celebrations and meetings.

They crossed the plaza to a wide archway and a set of broad stairs leading down. Moea picked up a lantern from a hook on the wall. The filaments within lit with a familiar Aetherian glow, soft and green. The light revealed a tunnel continuing down, into the earth.

“Are you ready?” Moea asked. Harry nodded, noting that this—several islanders wielding strange devices leading her into some dark subterranean passage—was the start of any number of lurid adventure tales that she ought to be mindful of.

The lantern meant their journey down the stairs was not so ominous as it might have been. All the corners were lit, even if the light seemed muted. The bottom of the stairs opened into a cavern, and the cavern itself opened into a chimney, reaching to a distant spot of sunlight, like a bright bulb far overhead. This was the volcano, the empty caldera inside the mountain. But not so empty. This was a factory, a workshop—a womb.

The volcano’s interior had been made into a great engine, geothermal heat transformed to steam that turned turbines, glowing green and humming with potential. Twisting tubes and wires fed in and out, connecting the engines both to the roots of the earth and to the work of various machines drawing out twisting lengths of wire, the circuits and hearts that formed the basis of Aetherian technology. She felt like she was standing inside a body, looking at the skeleton, nerves, and organs of the greatest Aetherian machine that ever was.

“This is our foundry, where we refine our metals and build our machines. This is what our Teacher left for us, and we have kept it safe.”

“Your teacher—”

“Come.”

In the back of the cavern, a large alcove had been carved into the volcanic stone, and in the alcove was a ship. Harry had studied the wreckage from the Surrey crash and knew this was an Aetherian vessel—but this one was intact: a shell-like form, built in plates that layered over one another like scales, gray and dull. The size of the Kestrel’s gondola, large enough for two people to sit in the cockpit, with some small amount of cargo. It seemed to have split in two, and the interior was hollowed out—salvaged for materials. The ship’s outer shell had been kept as a shrine.

“This . . . this ship did not crash. This ship landed,” Harry murmured. “All this time, my people have been dealing with scraps. Piecing together broken bits and trying to find the shape of the vase. But here—”

“The Sky Teacher brought us wonders.”

Harry felt a deep jealousy. “When—when was this?”

“It was many generations ago. When my people first came to this island, we found the Sky Teacher already here.”

For a long time, Harry speculated that the Surrey crash was not the first time Aetherians had visited Earth. She had found evidence to support this all over the world—bits and pieces left behind by an enigmatic civilization from beyond the heavens. She had not dreamed she would find a place like this.

“The pilot—the Aetherian pilot survived?” Harry’s desperation to know made her voice shrill.

Moea showed her a second alcove, arched, with a flat floor—like a sepulcher, ten feet long, wider than human. All that remained were scraps of metal, dust, some leathery pieces no bigger than her hand, and several hard scales. The pilot, long since rotted away.

Harry put her hand on the wall and said a small prayer. Not that the pilot needed it, but she was sad, and it was all she knew how to do. Pay some small respect.

Moea showed her other wonders. A man and woman sat at a console where dials glowed with power; they seemed to be monitoring something—shell-shaped metal cones through which hollow voices spoke. Wires ran from it up the cavern wall and out of sight, reaching for the outside world.

“You have antennae up there,” Harry said wonderingly. “You have wireless!”

Harry leaned in and listened more closely—a male voice speaking French was giving location and heading information, estimating his airship’s arrival at a destination. He never said what destination, which might have given her an idea of where she was. The islanders were monitoring wireless traffic, perhaps through the entire region, across this whole stretch of the Pacific.

This was it, this was their way home.

Harry wet her lips and began pleading. “Please, I must send a message. How far are we from Hong Kong? Australia? Where is the nearest British port? Do you hear from British airships? I must send them a message to tell them where we are, that we are safe—”

“That is not possible.”

“I see, you only have the means to receive signals, not broadcast. But that is nothing, if you can do one you can adapt your equipment to do the other. Marlowe can do it, he is an able engineer—”

“It is not possible because we cannot permit you. No one from the outside can ever know we exist.”

“But . . . Marlowe and I—”

“Maud, you were doomed when your ship flew too close to our island. Usually, our defenses destroy intruders.”

That . . . that sudden storm hadn’t been a storm. It had felt as if the Kestrel had struck a wall, and the lightning had flashed green. In retrospect, it seemed obvious: Aetherian green. A powered shield, like the fence, but this one immense, designed to protect the entire island. To protect all their secrets.

“That you survived is unusual. You are very fortunate,” Moea said.

No, she thought. Marlowe is an excellent pilot, that is how we survived. “Then why save us at all? We would both be dead on that beach now if you had not helped us.”

“We did not know that. As I said, you are very fortunate. You intrigued us, so we helped you.”

“But—”

“You can never leave Ahomana. This is how we have stayed safe for so long.”

“No,” Harry said. “I do not accept that. You do not understand—I am Princess Maud of Wales, my grandmother is Queen of the greatest empire this world has ever known—”

“Do you think that matters here?”

A hundred threats waited at the tip of Harry’s tongue. She could bring the might of the British Navy upon them, lecture further about her status and her obvious need—her right—to dictate what would happen here.

The storm shield that destroyed the Kestrel could destroy any other ship that approached. As long as Marlowe was ill, he was in the islanders’ power, and Harry couldn’t do a bloody thing.

• • • •

The next morning, after a night of formless, angry dreams, Harry went to Marlowe for the usual survey: Yes, he was breathing; no, he wasn’t feverish; yes, the wounds were healing. This morning, at long last, she found him looking back at her.

“Marlowe,” she whispered.

“What happened?” he murmured in a dry, scratching voice.

She fell against his shoulder, crying, her face pressed to his bare skin. She was aware this was undignified and possibly upsetting to Marlowe, but she didn’t care. She had held herself upright for too long, without even a corset to lean in to.

“Oh, my dear, shh,” he said, his voice holding a smile, however weak. He stroked her hair, a feather touch before the weakened limb fell across his chest.

She recovered quickly, wiping her face clean. “You have no idea how good it is to see you awake.”

“It was a . . . a close thing?”

She found a pitcher and cup of water the nurses had left, and helped Marlowe drink. He could only lift his head from the pillow for a moment before slumping back, sighing as if he had run a mile.

“It was. We crashed.”

He winced. “I . . . I’m not sure I remember.”

She held his hand, brushed what was left of his hair from his forehead. “You were badly hurt. The people of the island saved us. These islanders—Marlowe, I have so much to tell you. It’s all so strange, so impossible, I don’t know where to start.”

“You’re all right? They haven’t hurt you?”

Except for insisting that they couldn’t leave. “I’m well,” she said, so that he would be easy. He slipped back to sleep as gently as a feather falling.

The physicians came, and Marlowe woke again. He knew a little French, enough to say yes or no to their questions. They declared him mending nicely.

• • • •

The islanders held a feast that night, and Harry could have flattered herself that it was in her honor, but she knew better. She just happened to be there for one of their usual feast days. If they treated her kindly, and were solicitous of her needs and wants, it was out of general politeness.

There was dancing of the primitive sort she had read about and seen in photographs, all movement in the feet, hands, and hips. Hypnotic, vaguely scandalous—both the men and women wore little, and their hair was left long and streaming. Harry was startled when Moea leaned in to say, “This one tells the story of how the Sky Teacher came.”

With each gesture the dancers made, Moea told of an accompanying event. “Our ancestors were great travelers. They took their catamarans across the water to all the islands they could find, including Ahomana.”

As she explained, Harry could see meaning in the movements of the dancers’ hands—the suggestion of paddling an oar from side to side, the rippling movement of the waves, spread hands lifted high to show the rising sun.

“When our ancestors came here, they found another traveler, one who had crossed the spaces between stars.”

The dancers held one hand high, then brought it drifting down to meet the second, and both cupped downward into what was meant to be the shape of an island. A ship, coming to land.

“The Teacher was trapped here, his craft broken, and so he taught our ancestors the wonders of his world.”

The feast progressed. There was fruit, fish, something made of taro root. All good, but Harry found herself missing an afternoon of scones and cream. She quickly wiped the moisture from her eyes. She didn’t want the islanders to think she was ungrateful.

If she were a proper explorer, she’d be carefully remembering all this so she could write about it in some sensationalist travelogue, the marvels of the lost civilization of Ahomana. But all she really wanted at the moment, and for the first time during all the months of the entire journey, was to go home.

• • • •

Sooner than Harry expected, Marlowe, dressed in one of the islander tunics, was able to leave his pallet for short walks. She helped him, though at first he was reluctant to lean on her. “Marlowe, I’m your friend here, let me help you as a friend.” He gave up on propriety, then, and kept hold of her arm as they made slow progress around the room, then into the courtyards beyond.

She would not presume that no one here understood English. Some of the broadcasts that came through on their wireless device were in English. Thus someone here must know the language, whether they admitted it or not. So, Harry spoke softly when she explained to Marlowe that they would not be allowed to leave.

“They seem to give me some amount of privacy here,” she said. She brought him to the courtyard and pavilion where she had been spending her nights.

“It’s because you’re hardly likely to escape this,” Marlowe said, leaning to the edge of the window and the sheer drop of the hillside below.

“Indeed. Still, they do not seem to consider us prisoners, per se.”

“Honored permanent guests, then?” he said wryly.

“Marlowe, what are we going to do?”

He sat on a low bench, looking out the window to the ocean, and didn’t speak. She closed her eyes and listened to the water trickle from the fountain, a sound that seemed entirely counter to any sort of anxiety.

When she felt a pressure on her hand, she looked. Marlowe had taken hold of it and seemed to gain some fortitude from the pressure. “We’ll think of something,” he said.

He started to draw his hand away, but she kept hold, pulling herself in to sit beside him, hip against hip. Too close, but the further touch brought further comfort, and he responded, not by pulling away, but by bringing his arms around her in a heartfelt embrace. In that moment all was well, and she did not care what happened tomorrow.

She let out a comfortable sigh. When she tipped her head back to look, to try to guess what he was thinking, he was right there looking back at her, and their lips met, and they kissed. He tasted warm; he tasted like home.

This seemed then like no momentous thing. They were lost on an island, they might never leave, they were all but dead. But they were alive, they were together, of course they should kiss, and more, because in that moment, that was all they had.

• • • •

She lay beside him, studying every inch of him. Marlowe slept long and heavily, resting in her arms. He had overexerted himself, and the thought should have been terribly amusing. Instead, she felt confused. Complicated. But only when she thought of what to do next. For now, she pressed her body close to his, and was gratified when he came awake long enough to put his arms around her.

• • • •

“Marlowe heals quickly, with your care.” Moea’s sly smile and wink meant she was talking about more than Harry’s nursing duties. Difficult, keeping anything secret on this island. Harry blushed, though Moea seemed matter-of-fact about it.

They walked, Moea showing her more of the city, telling stories of this or that house, this or that grove of coconut trees, giving her both the French and local words for everything—teaching her about her new home. Harry wasn’t sure she wanted to know, and she wasn’t sure she had a choice.

“It’s terribly improper,” Harry said.

“You know that means nothing here,” she replied.

Of course it meant nothing on this placeless, timeless island. She was mere Maud here, not a princess. She should have enjoyed it, but she couldn’t forget about home. High on the peak of the old volcano, a series of antennae rose up—receivers for the islanders’ wireless device, transmitters that produced the defensive shield around Ahomana. A well-placed explosive charge would destroy the shield and allow ships to approach the island. A great deal of work for one person to accomplish, clandestinely, in a place where she was being watched at all times. Perhaps she could wait until Marlowe was stronger and could assist.

“What are you thinking, Maud?”

The woman saw her looking up, gaze narrowed, thinking. “I am thinking of far too much,” she murmured. “My mind is full.”

• • • •

For another night, for all of them now, Harry and Marlowe shared a bed.

“I’ve been over and over it,” she said, her voice muffled against his shoulder. “I believe I can get a signal out, I just need a few minutes alone with the equipment. The difficulty is we must also find a way to disable the shield, or we doom any ship that comes to search for us. This has to be done quickly, secretly. I don’t think I can do it alone, but the two of us working together—”

“Or we could stay,” he said.

She propped herself on an elbow and looked at him. This wasn’t a statement of surrender, because Marlowe did not give up.

No, he was stating the implication of choice. They could stay, because if they returned to England they could not be together as they were now. They would be giving up much by staying here. But they would also be giving up much by leaving.

She brushed strands of hair from his face, pressed the skin of his cheek. His blue eyes were shining and his gaze didn’t waver. His wound was healing, but there’d always be a twisting, puckered scar. The hair was growing back, but around the rough scar it was coming in white. It would look striking. He caught her hand, pressed her palm to his lips. His kiss sent a rush of warmth through her, penetrating to her bones. They could stay here, could stay just like this—forever.

She looked away, to the fountains and a world that anyone would call paradise. “We can’t abandon everything. God only knows what’s happening with the war back home—”

He chuckled, an expression that made his face light up in a way she hadn’t seen in weeks. “I like to think the realm is strong enough to survive without two of its subjects, even if one of them is the Queen’s granddaughter.”

He was right, of course. “When you were feverish, you talked. I think some of it was about your family, which made me think: You never speak of them.”

Now it was his turn to stare outward, and she regretted mentioning it. She quickly added, “I beg your pardon, the subject is obviously painful to you—”

“I am a middle son in a very large family of very poor gentry. My father has—” He paused, obviously seeking polite language, “—has been dissolute. My brothers have followed in his footsteps. They have chased many schemes to make their fortunes, and all their schemes cost more. My mother and sisters—” At this, he shook his head. “I ran off to join the Navy, and they have never forgiven me for it. It ought to be beneath us. We were meant to be well born, and my desire to make something of myself by working flies in the face of the story they tell about themselves. I changed my name so no one would mistake our connection. I haven’t spoken to them in something like ten years. Most of them, at any rate. My eldest brother found me last year to ask for money, and called me an ingrate when I would not give it.”

“Richard.”

“Yes. I must have said quite a lot when I was ill.”

“Not so much.”

“You see—if I do not return, there is no one to miss me. But you—you would miss your family,” he said.

“I would,” she said, smiling sadly. “I miss my brother, and I miss May and the boys, and Louise’s letters, and I even miss Mother and Toria. We’ve had an odd life, being who we are, but we are a family.”

“Well then,” he said, touching her cheek, brushing his lips to her forehead. “We will find a way to bring you back to them.”

• • • •

When he was strong enough, Harry and Moea brought Marlowe to see the cavern and the shell of the Aetherian craft.

He stood for a long time before it, staring in awe as one might do when walking to the altar of a medieval cathedral. He put his hand by the niche where the pilot’s body had lain, and Harry wondered if he also murmured a prayer.

He asked Moea questions. Dozens of questions about the engines, the turbines, the cooling mechanisms, the lubricants they used on the machinery—a mixture containing coconut oil—and the composition of the metal alloy their manufacturing process produced. The islander answered some of the questions, but when Marlowe’s words became too probing, she said, “This was built generations ago, even I do not know all its workings.”

It was a clear evasion. She would not say how their camouflaging shields worked, or if there was a way to reach the peak of the volcano.

The short outing exhausted him, and they retreated to their room.

Marlowe seemed struck again and again by what they had found. “An intact ship, and the pilot still alive to explain it all—dear God, what Carlisle and the others could have done with that.”

“I know,” she said.

“You’re right, I think. With enough care and planning we could send a signal and disable the shield. One of us would have to climb the mountain—that’s a full day. It should probably be you, I’m not yet strong enough for that. But I have a confession, Harry.” He held her hands; his body was stiff with anxiety. “I think of the Navy here, airships and soldiers crawling all over the city, and pillaging—and I’m not sure I want to do it.”

She was almost relieved, because she had had the same thought, and felt like a traitor for thinking it. It seemed her choice wasn’t between staying or escaping; it was between betraying her home, or betraying the hospitality of the islanders.

Sacrifices must be made, she thought in a voice that sounded disconcertingly like her grandmother’s. But such calculations removed the emotion of the actual sacrifice.

Surely the fate of the realm did not depend on two lost souls. But what if it did?

She said, “We could defeat Germany with what we’ve found here.” The war between Britain and Germany had been going on for years already. She would do much to end it, in England’s favor.

“Or make the war worse,” he said, no doubt thinking, like she was, of the endless power generated by those great turbines. They could make an energy shield built around the whole of Europe.

Not to mention . . . what horrible weapons could be derived from such technology?

• • • •

Harry decided: Britain and the war were more important than Ahomana. Returning home with technology that would ensure British supremacy was more important. Her duty said that she must do what she could to escape.

Marlowe was right that he wasn’t strong enough to scale the volcano. He was so much better than he had been, but he still spent most of every day sleeping, healing.

So Harry would have to find a way to do this on her own.

Despite how much time she spent with Moea, despite all her careful observation, she still didn’t know how the islanders’ staves worked. She would have to steal one, examine it. If she could master one of the control staves—that was the key to all. She might not need to climb to the peak and physically destroy the shield generator if she could simply turn it off. Leave it intact, for the Navy to examine. Find a staff, send a message, deactivate the shield.

Simple, really.

The members of the city’s governing council carried the staves. Harry counted seven of them. There might have been others, spares, in storage somewhere. But she concentrated on those seven.

Moea had chambers with her family: her husband, Hina, and three children—nearing adulthood, they were seldom at home as they embarked on apprenticeships. They were an admirable family. They’d hosted Harry and Marlowe for meals every few days. As with the tours of the city, they seemed to be doing their best to make the strangers feel welcome, since this would be their home, now.

At home, Moea kept her staff in its own chest, a box dug out of a tree trunk, near the door. Protected, out of the way. It was not locked. The house was not guarded. Harry could go there while everyone slept; no one would ever know.

She didn’t tell Marlowe what she planned because she didn’t want him to worry.

They were still being watched—an attendant outside the courtyard, who would see if either of them left through the doorway. So Harry didn’t use the doorway.

The route she took was long and harrowing, especially in the dark, but a near-full moon offered sufficient light. She managed to climb through the jungle, along the outer terraces of the city, then slip back in through a window.

Quickly, quietly, she made her way along back streets, the very pathways Moea had been so careful to show her, until she reached the woman’s home. Ideally, she could grab the staff and execute the rest of the plan shortly after. If the Navy was already on its way when she was discovered, the islanders wouldn’t be able to stop her.

Like so many of the houses here, the front room had wide windows to let in cool air. Outside, jungle trees rustled, and a bird called. The room was clean, sparse, so different from the jumbled ornate parlors of home, with endless furniture and decorated walls. Matting made of palm fronds covered the floor, there was a low table, and a pair of carved oars hung on the wall. They’d been made by Moea’s great-great-grandfather, she said. There was a second table that held bowls, cups, dishes, utensils, and a planter with orchids growing in it.

Harry knelt by the chest where the staff was stored, put her hand on it, and stopped.

She had become a thief. Finally, after all she’d been through, that was the thought that defeated her.

She could be a thief, or she could surrender to her fate. Thief, or coward. Neither choice was acceptable for a Princess of Wales. Dammit. She leaned against the wall, covered her face with her hands, and decided.

She stepped away from the chest and left the house.

On the pathway outside, Moea and several of her attendants were waiting, carrying lanterns that threw strange shadows. They were like carvings in mahogany. Harry felt small and useless before them.

Harry said, “You’ve been watching the whole time.”

“Yes, Maud,” Moea said.

“I should be ashamed. I am mostly confused.”

“You are at sea.”

“Yes.”

“Maud. Come, we will watch the sunrise from the courtyard.”

Harry joined the group and went with them down the sloping path to the center of the city. She said, “Do you know anything of duty? What holds your loyalty, Moea?”

“I have a duty to my family, to my friends. We all have a duty to this island and what we’ve built here. And to the world. We hold this place in trust, and protect the world by keeping it secret.”

“I have a duty to my island as well. It’s duty to the world I’m only just learning of.”

In the courtyard, she was surprised to see Marlowe there. He was sitting on the stone pavement, leaning against one of the palm trunks, seeming exhausted.

She ran forward to meet him. She hadn’t meant to, but she was so happy to see him. He held her arms, kissed her, his touch lingering, and comfort filled her, sunshine pouring through her whole self.

“I was coming to help,” he whispered. “But I seem to be having one of my off days and lost my breath. You were discovered.”

“Yes. But I changed my mind first.”

“It’s all right, we’ll figure something out.”

Moea waited patiently for them to turn and face her. Harry wondered what punishment awaited her. But the woman was smiling.

“Marlowe, Maud. Can you keep a promise?”

• • • •

Moea’s wireless operators sent a distress call the next day. They asked for, and Harry and Marlowe gave them, the shortest message possible that would elicit a response: HMS Kestrel downed in a storm, coordinates to follow. Send help.

High enough up the chain of command, word that the Kestrel was in trouble would inspire an immediate response. They wouldn’t need to say anything else.

After that, Moea and her council, along with a crowd of onlookers, came to the shore to see them off. Two men prepared one of the smaller outrigger canoes—the craft their ancestors had traveled across the ocean in had been giant, Moea said, enough to carry a whole village and their necessities. That must have been an incredible sight.

Harry and Marlowe looked over their old camp, in tatters now after the weeks they’d spent in the city. The fabric had decayed to nothing, and what remained of the timbers and brass fittings had been blown or washed away. Evidence remained of Marlowe’s bed—a sunken pallet of grass, covered now in mold and grime.

Marlowe stared at the spot for a long time. “I don’t remember this place,” he murmured.

She touched his arm, bringing him back to himself. They’d changed back into the clothes they’d arrived in, leaving the clothing of the island, and further evidence of their time here, behind. They looked awful, rags hanging off them, all the scars and trials of the last months marked on their features. Her matted hair was tied up and out of the way, and Marlowe had a beard.

She found a rotten trunk, dug around for a minute, and while the sunken spot where the strongbox had been was still evident, the box was gone. She slumped back, sitting heavily, defeated once more.

“Maud?” Moea asked.

“There was a box here, it had . . . artifacts I’d gathered. I suppose I should just let it go.” All that work, all those months of journeying for nothing. Well, not for nothing—she and Marlowe had survived. That was something. “It is already in the canoe, along with another box. A gift, from me.”

Harry stared. “You’re too kind. You . . . have been all too kind.”

“Remember that kindness, if you ever think of breaking your promise. You owe me your promise.”

They would be allowed to leave, but they must never speak of Ahomana. They must never say a hint of its existence. They must keep the secret forever. Moea said that she and the council realized Harry and Marlowe would never be at home on the island, would never adapt and would always think of escape. But they did not know if they could trust the foreigners until Harry walked away from that cabinet.

“Yes, ma’am,” she said.

“Don’t open my gift until the canoe has left.”

Harry nodded. Then, finally, they embraced.

They loaded the canoe with the last of the supplies and climbed on board. Harry checked and yes, the strongbox was there. She didn’t look inside to see if the artifacts were intact—she had to show her own trust. And besides, if the box was empty, she couldn’t do anything about it. She and Marlowe were going home, and that was enough.

The two men paddled the canoe past the breakers and out beyond the island’s last spit of land. There, they set the mast and raised the square sail. No Aetherian engine or alien structure here. Just wind and fabric, technology thousands of years old. If it was the only technology one had, it was certainly the best.

Harry turned to watch the shore recede. Moea raised her hand, and Harry matched her, a lingering farewell.

When the Aetherian shield was disengaged, the world beyond came into view. This island was part of a chain, spots of land hulking like turtles’ backs in the distance, ancient volcanoes that had weathered into jungle-covered hills. The canoe reached the first of these in an hour. After leaving Harry and Marlowe and their boxes on the shore, the men offered polite farewells, and shoved the canoe back into the waves.

“Thank you,” Harry said for what felt like the millionth time.

Long after the canoe had traveled too far to see, she and Marlowe watched the place on the ocean where they had gone. The great cone of Ahomana was there, somewhere, but the shield had been restored, and it was invisible once more.

Marlowe said, “And we are alone again.” His words seemed to echo, even over the sound of the waves. “I certainly hope the Navy got that message.”

Harry knelt in the sand and opened the strongbox: All its treasure was intact, nothing had been touched. They had their artifacts, and each other, and she was sure the Navy had gotten the message.

And there was the box Moea had given them: two hands’ width on a side, the lid secured with simple cord. She opened it. Inside was the wood and cloth mask, the device the doctors had used to supply Marlowe with oxygen during the worst of his illness. Tubes coiled underneath, along with the valves that regulated the flow of air.

He reached around, touching the mask’s fabric. “That . . . would you believe, I think I remember that.”

“It saved your life.”

“Is that why Moea gave it to us?”

Harry smiled. This wasn’t a gift—it was a lesson. “Medical application. Just the sort of Aetherian research we haven’t pursued as we should have.”

He held the mask, studying the valves and how they attached. He had that look in his eyes, turning a problem over and over again.

“Air pressure,” he said. “It regulates air pressure.”

As altitude increased, air pressure decreased. There wasn’t enough oxygen to breathe. That was the problem they had to solve, to fly higher, to break into the space beyond. To follow the Aetherians.

They looked hard at each other, the future rising before them.

“We can do it,” she murmured, and closed her hand over his. “Build a pressurized cabin and air supply, like a diving suit, but for the upper atmosphere.” They would not even be breaking their promise to Moea—this was just another artifact they’d found, like all the others.

His gaze went up, to the horizon beyond the water. “Harry, look,” Marlowe said, pointing. He squinted—his eyesight was still weak. But the shape of an airship against the sun was clear. The Aetherian hum traveled even this far over the water, a higher-pitched shushing than the waves. At this distance, the glow pulsed. The airship displayed British Navy flags.

Harry’s heart started pounding. Soon, the ship would throw down a ladder, haul them up, and they would be back in the world. Wasn’t that what she wanted?

“James,” Harry breathed. She took hold of his shirt, pulled him to her, kissed him, knowing this taste of him would have to last a good long while. She hoped to remember every second of it, the way his lips moved against hers, the way his hands dug into her hips, as if he hoped to weather a storm against her. When she pulled back, she saw so much longing in his gaze, her heart broke a little.

“It’ll be all right,” he said. “Somehow.”

Apart now, they went down the shore and waved at the approaching vessel.

©2018 by Carrie Vaughn.

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 recent books include Martians Abroad and Amaryllis and Other Stories, as well as her post-apocalyptic mysteries for John Joseph Adams Books, the Philip K. Dick Award-winning Bannerless, and its sequel, The Wild Dead. 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.

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

The Last to Matter

Adam-Troy Castro | 8600 words

Kayn knew he was being rejected by the orgynism for almost a full year before it fully expelled him.

He could easily live a million years past this humiliation and never understand what he had done to deserve such a rejection from the collective that had loved him so well, for so long.

He had been one of the orgynism’s founders, the man who had provided its organizing principles and solicited the first participants, the architect who had drawn up the parameters for the pleasure-feedback loops, and as a result, he’d been honored to spend its many years of existence as the seed nexus around which all its carnality orbited. For all that time, the orgynism’s participants, male and female and neuter and recombinant, had always tithed some of their pleasure to his, their sensations flowing in his direction through the neural connections all had agreed to upon joining the collective, just as their other surgically implanted connections also provided him with oxygen for his lungs and nutrients for his blood. Pierced in all of a dozen places and piercing in a dozen others, he had known nothing but mindless bliss, at the orgynism’s core.

How lucky he had considered himself, at those rare moments when conscious thought had space to intervene, for living in a time when such things were possible!

One would think that the bastards would have damn well appreciated that.

Then, one by one, the connections were withdrawn, the devotion toward his pleasure above all else was sidelined, and the peristalsis of the dozens of interconnected bodies began to move him, bit by bit, toward the outskirts. The limbs of his many lovers now grasped him not in embrace but in firm urging toward the exit, and though they were gentle about it, taking more than a year to shift him from the orgynism’s center to its periphery, they also brooked no argument. He continued to feel pleasure. But, throughout, he also knew that he was being dispensed with.

At the end of the year, Kayn popped sweaty and glistening from the hovering sphere of bodies, and slammed to the soft floor a man-height below. The living tubes that had provided him with nutrients and euphoric drugs tore free of his flesh and slithered back into the ball of copulating bodies, there to disappear beneath the shifting landscape of shoulders and buttocks and ecstatic faces. Nobody whose features were exposed bothered to open their eyes and acknowledge his bereft status, his enforced farewell; not one of the women, not one of the men, not any of the recombinants said goodbye. As far as they were concerned, he was gone, and he was forgotten, as irrelevant to the orgynism as any other sight or sound of the world its pleasures locked out.

For some time, he sat moist and heartbroken below the throbbing ball of former lovers, lost in the novelty of separation. Then a portal opened on the wall to his right and his replacement, a creature with a half-dozen sets of complete sexual organs from forehead to midriff, undulated in, its naked form already studded with the necessary interfaces for the nutrient tubes and neurological feedback wires. It glanced at him, registering his predicament but not remarking on it, before turning away and striding the rest of the way to the orgynism Kayn had left and that it was now joining. One leap and the new lover was caught. The orgynism throbbed at the point of impact, and swallowed the newcomer whole.

Kayn considered fighting his way back into the collective, clawing with tooth and nail back to a dominant place at its center. But as devastated as he was, he knew that this would be a pathetic and doomed attempt at rape. He’d be outnumbered, for one thing. For another, now that not all of his consciousness was dominated by incoming sensation, the emptiness of the rutting that had occupied so many years of his life depressed him. Maybe that’s why his lovers had expelled him; they’d sensed his flagging commitment.

So he stood. He applied to the same portal the newcomer had entered for his own exit, passing through the surgical vestibule now tasked with rendering him respectable for the outside world. It first sprayed him with topical anesthetics, and then with flashes of whirring knives amputated the various extra sexual inlets and protuberances that he’d needed before but would not be using again, a dizzying flurry of male and female castrations and other surgeries coupled with accelerated healing that by the time he’d completed ten steps had restored him to his birth settings. As soon as he was whole, spray nozzles emerged from the walls, bathed him, and then covered him with a thin gloss of purple liquid that congealed as neck-to-ankle clothing. It was not clothing in the sense that it preserved modesty, in part because he had none; it simply conformed to the shape of his genitalia, displaying it in full openness as was only proper. It was also imbedded with connections to the machines that did all the city’s thinking, which anticipated his likely needs and informed him that there were currently still seventeen other orgynisms being maintained at various other locations around the city. Some were currently recruiting. He could resume his carnal pleasures with scarcely a pause for the gathering of breath. But the paucity of this number shocked him. When he founded his orgynism, there’d been more than three hundred others. Thirteen of the seventeen still in existence were full up, their participants having opted for full lobotomization in order to fight off any urges toward disbanding. Four had heard about his ejection, and had issued invitations to his account. He demurred and moved on. The door at the end of the vestibule slid into its recess and provided the newly-freed, freshly-clothed, sexually-refreshed Kayn back onto the street.

He composed a sonnet of heartbreak. He did this in the way anybody had written anything, in the last few millennia: by taking it upon himself to declare that such a thing should be written and mentally ordering the machines that ran everything to write one for him. It was produced at once, delivered to his cortex by the connection with the machines that was the birthright of all who lived.

What emerged was the worst sonnet ever.

He was no expert in poetry. Nobody was. That was why composing it had long since become the domain of the machines. Who wanted to go to all that effort, especially since no one would ever read it? Might as well let the machines take care of that impulse. But in past years, they would have come up with a good sonnet. This one was mostly made-up words, and still failed to scan.

How irritating.

He didn’t order a replacement. He just set about finding out what had become of the city during his years of distraction.

• • • •

Once, there had been tens of thousands of cities. They had hugged the shorelines and punctuated the rivers and marked the wider points in the road, wherever goods were carried from one place to another. They had occupied the places where the holes were dug in the earth so the resources could be ripped out; places where the crops were grown, where the tools were built, even where people went just to lay in the sun. Once there had been enough people to fill those tens of thousands of cities. Then many had fled Earth, launching themselves at a universe that seemed infinite with possibility. A few had come back saying that this had turned out not to be true, that the universe was in fact a cold and inhospitable place with little soil congenial to humanity; a few others had returned and said that this was nonsense, that the stars teemed with opportunities for those who possessed the courage to seize them, and that humanity’s diaspora had accomplished wonders undreamt of by those who had stayed behind. Either story could have been true. But it no longer mattered which, now. Eons had passed. The distant outposts had fallen silent. The constellations had gone dark. Most civilization had crumbled to dust. The descendants of the billions who stayed behind had dwindled to millions, and then to thousands.

Long before Kayn joined the orgynism, the city had shrunk in the ways cities do when there are no longer enough people to fill them. Entire sections had been claimed by the surrounding desert, even as others were built up to look more elaborate, more magnificent, more a play-palace for the residents who remained. When Kayn founded his orgynism, one could still venture out into the remaining streets and find a crowd, at any hour of the day or night (those being antiquated distinctions even by then, as the sun no longer shone brightly enough to make a proper day). But sometime since he first joined his lovers, the city’s masses had thinned out even more. Even on the first major thoroughfare Kayn investigated, there were almost no people, except for those who had elected to become trees and who stood at regular intervals, being watered by automatic systems, as they spread their arms and faced a sky that reflected their emptiness with its own.

Some of the trees could still talk and provided him with directions, an important service when the streets had changed orientation and no longer led to the right places, but they were trees and not capable of much conversation beyond that. So Kayn headed for the city center, where there was always activity to be had, and as he went he ran into some of his remaining neighbors.

He met a dandy being fitted for a suit more magnificent than any ever produced by any tailor. It was a glossy multi-colored thing that, the dandy told him, the mechanisms had been laboring to spin on his frame for several decades now. It was far too voluminous to permit physical movement and so the dandy sat at the center of enough frilled cloth to fill a space the size of a ballroom, only his face showing, like an egg being cradled by an acre of satin. Hand-mirrors orbited him, propelled by little puffs of compressed air that also served to dispense perfume. “I am beautiful,” he told Kayn. “I am the most beautiful thing alive.” It was his ambition to have fresh frills added to his ever-growing outfit for as long as the machines remained sufficiently operational to do so, at which point he would have himself injected with a plasticizing compound so he could spend what remained of eternity as his suit’s undecaying mannequin. Kayn commended him on his choice of performance art and moved on.

He met a woman who had decided to spend her years giving birth. She sat naked, her back against a wall, her legs splayed to facilitate the escape of her offspring, a glistening fetal something who while Kayn watched several times squirmed its way free of her birth canal, then climbed up her body to force its way back into her open mouth. This was its cyclical journey: escaping her, then escaping the outside world, then escaping her again. The woman was unable to tell Kayn why she’d chosen to spend her years this way, likely because her child’s constant invasions of her throat had ravaged her vocal cords, but the baby had the consciousness of an adult and was able to tell Kayn what it knew of the city’s recent history. There’d been some programmed revolutions, some happy genocides, the rise of some murderous despot or two who had painted the streets with blood until the city decreed that it was no longer their turn to have fun. Once, a murderer had been brought in, and the citizenry had amused itself being slaughtered by him. This, Kayn figured, accounted for much of the fallen population. But the baby informed him of something else that also made sense, given the squalor of the cityscape around him: that the machines that kept things running had been breaking down for years, and that as more and more of them stopped working, the servitors were only able to keep some neighborhoods running by scavenging parts from those that didn’t. Kayn took this with some excitement. He was starving for novelty and found being part of a crumbling civilization just what he needed. He thanked the baby for its time and moved on.

He passed a circular fountain, now dry and caked with clotted blood, where the skeletons of two human beings lay in a heap that suggested they’d died together. An old man sat throwing bread crumbs on the bodies, in order to enjoy the sight of the birds fluttering around the bones. Kayn asked what had happened and the old man said that there were any number of sights like this, tucked in this place and that: evidence of that killer who had been allowed to run amuck for a while, for the entertainment value that provided. Kayn, who had been murdered once or twice in his long life and did not care to have that happen again, asked if the pet killer had been disposed of once his novelty value was exhausted, and the old man said, “Oh, sure, sure; really, there’s only so much you can do with a creature like that, before they start to repeat themselves in unacceptable ways.” He sighed, pointed at the larger of the two skeletons and said, “That one was me.” Kayn bid the old man farewell and moved further into the center of the city, finding along the way that he had to traverse any number of places where passages were blocked by drifts of sand.

This is how he knew that he was getting closer to the place he sought.

• • • •

In outline the city resembled the infinity symbol, a pair of teardrop-shapes designed to converge at the narrowest points. This deliberate bottleneck was an intersection less than a hundred paces across at its narrowest point, open to the untouched landscape on both sides. It was a feature originally designed as a place of wonder, a plaza where the citizenry could pause and take in the unspoiled, or at least unpopulated, wilderness outside the city walls, reflect on the part of the world no one in the city ever needed, and move on, to whatever pleasures awaited in either of their home’s two halves.

The last time Kayn had been to this place, just before joining with the orgynism, the mechanisms that had kept the desert on both sides from intruding on this narrow bottleneck of civilization had already started to fail, and the pavement tiles had all felt gritty underfoot, a first sign that the sands had already begun to intrude. It was worse now. The drifts of gray sand now extended from one side of the narrow strip to another, fingers of pure decay well into the process of sundering the city’s two halves from one another. In the very center, the tiles had disintegrated completely, and Kayn did not just stumble over shifting sands but sink knee-deep into them. Something bit him in the leg. He cursed and dragged himself onto the tiles on the other side of the gap, pulling the buried creature along with him: He yanked it free of his leg, and examined the thing that had bitten him at arm’s length. It was a tiny thing as wide as his wrist, with a nearly human face but for the slit nose and lipless mouth, and little human arms, but a torso that trailed to a point rather than sprout legs. Everything below its waist looked like some turds do, when they’ve been inside the colon so long that they’ve taken on the wrinkles and folds of the surrounding tissue.

Kayn almost smashed the shit-thing dead, but then it said, “Don’t kill me!”

He grimaced but did not hurl it away as he would have wanted. “What are you?”

“I’m a man.”

Kayn said, “I don’t believe you.”

“Laugh all you want. I’m prepared for when the city’s gone. I’ll survive a lot longer than you. I’ll still be thriving in these sands when the sun goes cold.”

Blood, Kayn’s blood, dripped from the thing’s fangs.

Kayn said, “The sun’s gone cold. It made the news.”

“Colder,” the shit-thing clarified. “If it had gone out, we’d all be dead.”

“Cold enough. The desert won’t support life.”

“You’re half-right. It won’t support human life. You can’t go stumbling out there, trying to make a go of it, without freezing your nuts off. But life like me is still making a go of it, and will for a while yet. I’m the wave of the future. So feed me or let me go; I’m tired of your crap.”

Kayn almost hurled it to the tiles and stomped it to a greasy spot, but there are penalties to casual murder even in a city where murder can be arranged as a source of entertainment, and so he simply dropped it into the gap between the city’s decaying halves, and watched as it burrowed its way into the sands. He wondered if it was alone or if it was one member of a thriving colony, and if so, just what they fed on, down there, as it could not survive only on the blood of those like him, who stumbled in the crossing. And then he shrugged. In any city, even this one, it was possible to intercept any number of stories that had nothing to do with yourself, and if you did not want them to become your stories instead, you had to move on, banishing them to the status of footnotes or apocrypha.

He marched on, past the narrows, past a broken archway into the city’s other half, where after a while he began encountering other residents again. An emaciated but bearded woman, clad only in the few strips of clothing that had not yet rotted off her, nodded at him as she crossed an avenue, bearing a squirming human-shaped something in a sack on her shoulders. Two children, a rarity when he’d joined the orgynism, sat in a tree chattering nonsense at one another, and he spent a few minutes attempting to coax them down before realizing that, human or not, they were joined to the tree by stems, and enjoying life as its fruit. A man in a long multi-colored coat, ragged and bearded and mad, darted into a narrow alley lined with knives, that ripped pieces from him as he fled heedless into a potent darkness at its other end. Two other men played a variant of chess, only with many thousands of additional pawns and knights, across a game board so vast that their pieces had yet to contend with one another at the center of the board; both players were draped in drifts of dust, each one so involved in calculating the possible ramifications of any move that it might have been years since they had done anything but wait.

• • • •

It was only after he entered a neighborhood where none of the buildings had doors, where they were just unmarked monoliths offering no clue as to what they might have contained, that he found a place that had been once been one of his favorites. Prior civilizations would have called it an inn, or café, or restaurant. It served the same function with some adjustments for the nature of the way the city’s people interacted with one another. The last time he’d been here, centuries earlier, had been Poison Day and he had sat alongside two dozen other patrons there to soak up the novelty of dining and dying and dining and dying only to dine and die some more. It had been glorious. Today, of course, he didn’t want to feel his insides turn to fire inside him. He just wanted to plug himself back into whatever social intercourse the city could still provide, while making contacts for whatever grand joy came next. And so he entered the familiar room with its frescoes of hanging gardens, overjoyed to find it, if not full, then at least occupied by half a dozen others, including two old men locked in conversation, one lone man addressing his soup with what could only be described as grim determination, and a forlorn young woman with dark circles under her eyes, staring at her plate of something as if wholly uncertain what it was.

Kayn said, “Excuse me.”

The woman was silver-skinned, no doubt plated with the actual metal, a fashion choice that had been popular once upon a time. He supposed that it must be completely antiquarian now. So were her eyes, which were pink and lemur-large against cheeks buffed to a mirrored finish. She sat with her delicate hands palm-down on the table, flanking her bowl but making no move to lift it to her lips. But she was not forlorn enough to ignore Kayn’s hello. She met his gaze and released half-a-dozen syllables of purest gibberish in no language he knew, which was not all that unusual. Kayn had lived through entire renaissances of enthused linguistic experimentation where all of the city’s thousands had ordered the machines to design individual tongues for them, and had happily wandered the streets as citizens of Babel, content to not understand each other at all.

He pressed further: “Do you understand me?”

She cycled through a dozen tongues, some known to him, and some not, before arriving at the one he’d used to address her. “Can I help you?”

“Will you accept my company?”

“I wasn’t looking for company, but I don’t specifically object to it. I am willing to discuss anything but politics, morality, or the flattening effect of multiplying temporal paradoxes.”

“My full name is Adam Splendor Sadness Feline Igneous Ultimate Never Cul-De-Sac Untoward Synchronicity Leverage Cystic Beverage Arrogance Wholly Thirteen Cunnilingus Hummingbird Multiplication Kayn. You can call me Kayn.”

She provided her name, not a spoken syllable but a blast of tropical warmth, humid and filled with peat. “You can call me Peat. Please sit.”

“All right.” He sat opposite her, and let the table generate a meal for him, utensils and all. There was no mucking about with menus, sentient or otherwise. The establishment had tasted him and determined just what combination of foodstuffs was most appropriate for his current mood. What came, rising out of the solid table like the sun coming up on the horizon, was a bowl of something moving, something clearly sentient and alive, something that sang in soft, mournful despair as it awaited slaughter at the tip of his heated, six-pronged fork. He didn’t make it wait for very long, just stabbed through its tiny skull with one ruthless thrust, and lifted it to his mouth, feeling satiated as its death throes distributed what flavor it had. This had long been one of his favorite dishes. But today it was oily and bland, and when he was done chewing, it left an unpleasant gritty residue between his teeth. It was as if the sand of the surrounding desert had gotten into the synthesizers themselves.

She noted his displeasure and said, “You’re surprised. You must have been gone for a while. Orgynism?”

“Yes.”

“I was in one, about eight hundred years ago. It was a big one, with over a thousand participants, at its peak. It was bliss until one near the center went insane and started chewing his way out. I’m still missing some toes. How long have you been out?”

He told her.

“That explains your reaction to the food. You’re new to the way things have been falling apart.”

“I notice you’re not eating either.”

“I never do. I have no stomach. No internal organs of any kind. This,” she said, drumming her silvery digits on the table, “is what I’m made of now. I suppose I’ll last longer this way, when the city’s gone.”

“So it’s not a rumor.”

“No.”

He pointed at her food. “You ordered.”

“I wanted to sit. The table provided. But I outgrew food long ago. You should, too. The city won’t be making much more of it.”

He remembered the predictions of the shit-thing. “How much time do you think we still have? Months? Years? Centuries?”

“Who cares? It’s not like this place is fun anymore. We’ve seen everything. We’ve done everything. I’m only alive out of inertia.”

He said, “Up for suicide? I’ll join you, if that’s what you want.”

“I’ve done that,” Peat replied. “It didn’t take.”

“Then let’s get married.”

“I’ve done that a couple of dozen times, too. Once with you, in fact, though we weren’t the only people involved. But if you’d like to be in love for a while, just to pass the time, I’m willing to do that.”

“All right,” said Kayn.

Their courtship over, they both left the table, to make the necessary arrangements.

• • • •

They didn’t know each other and didn’t like each other much, but that was no longer an inconvenience, not when they were both available and there were still working machines dispensing love. It was just a matter of recalibrating their internal referents and setting what intensity they wanted, from mild affection to all-out raging, clothes-shredding passion. The first through fourth of the stations they investigated were all derelict, three merely devoid of power and one incapable of producing anything but flatulent noises, but the fifth they found, in a vacant bazaar on the seventh level of the abandoned Third Church of Gilgul the Materialist, was still capable of producing Love at some settings, albeit none of the better ones. As per his lifelong habit as a man more comfortable with receiving that emotion than feeling it, he took a dose two notches lower than hers, and felt a surge of deep affection while she elected to feel something more, something rich and genuine and pure.

There was no chance of a standard honeymoon night, not that he wanted one, after the sexual surfeit of his recent centuries. He may have still possessed the parts, but she did not. But companionship, she provided. They shared a bed and sometimes a vat, and during the days they wandered the city, noting all the places that still existed and those that were still a ghost of what they had used to be.

They went to the Cinema, the last Cinema, a place that had been established millennia before, where mechanisms behind the screen projected a perpetual story compelling enough to be joined or abandoned at any point, without any sense that one had missed something. Alas, something primal had been lost over the years. In Kayn’s youth, the story had been an intricate saga of intrigue in the court of some medieval kingdom, driven by subtle turns of character and shifts of power dynamics among a cast of thousands. It had once kept him in his seat, being fed and tended by bots, for more than a month before the sameness overwhelmed him and he’d wandered out of the auditorium looking for a place to set some bombs. Years later, he’d returned, and the story had contracted to two men, armed with knives, grappling with one another in the center of a field of corpses. He’d spent a day watching them cut little strips of flesh off one another’s bodies, discerned no story, and left. Now, returning with Peat to an auditorium ankle-deep in sand occupied by a half-dozen dusty patrons he recognized from his earlier visits and who he presumed to have been watching the entire saga from the beginning, he found that the story had contracted still further: It was now a man forever punching a solid wall with the wrist-nubs that were all that remained of his arms, after his fists had eroded from an unimaginable number of constant impacts. “The machines are stuck,” Peat explained. “They used to be able to introduce new characters, establish new plot developments, create brand-new complications capable of carrying the narrative to new places, but in recent years they’ve been deteriorating. The narrative’s become fossilized. You can sit for years waiting for something different to happen.”

“It’s a great unintentional metaphor,” said Kayn.

The two of them stayed six hours, just watching the unfortunate on screen pummel the wall, waiting for something else to happen, anything else to happen. Nothing did, and they ultimately left in search of new adventures.

They found an abandoned building where Peat said that she’d lived once, a tower now leaning seventeen degrees which once would have been righted or had its architectural deficiency incorporated as a fresh source of novelty, and scaled the exterior to the summit, one hundred and forty stories above the avenue below. The apartment they found there was infested with spiders, and criss-crossed with vast curtains of webbing. The tenants, three women and one man, were cocooned and in the process of being digested, but did not seem to mind. One explained to Kayn that the spiders made such wonderful music. Kayn could detect nothing. Peat said that she could: “It’s just above your range of hearing, Kayn.”

He asked her what kind of music they were playing, and she said: “Waltzes. I can hum along, if you’d like to dance.” So they danced, the tightly wrapped residents of the apartment watching with delight and fascination as Kayn and Peat spun their circles across the tilted floor. How long they danced, Kayn could not tell, but it was long enough for the spiders to begin the process of capturing them, swathing Kayn in what looked like bandages and Peat in what looked like a diaphanous gown. And for a while he thought that it would not be a bad thing for his years of existence to end this way, so high above the city streets, as close to the dimming stars as he had ever been. But the spiders began to work in earnest, his skin began to itch, and he was moved to tell Peat that maybe they ought to go. They climbed back down, without him hearing so much as a single note.

Back on the streets, they found a corpse willing to speak to them. Terrible things had been done to him by a passing murderer of unremitting savagery, perhaps the same one whose handiwork Kayn had already seen here and there: It honestly didn’t matter, not to the victim and not to Kayn, because the deed had been done and the corpse was not willing to do anything constructive to fix it. His chest was still open to the elements, but he had elected not to heal or to die, but rather to continue to lie where the monster had left him, choosing to spend what time the city had left on his back, in contemplation of the few remaining stars. He said, “I remember being part of a great love story. I do not remember whether it was two men or two women or one woman and one man or a pair of thirders or any of the hundreds of other possible combinations we came up with, by the time it all started falling apart, but I remember being one of them. I remember telling the one I loved that I would never forget. I remember the finger against my lips, the whispered words, sure you will; everything we have done is just footnote. That turned out to be true. It was the one great love of my life and it happened so long ago that I cannot remember who my lover was, or for that matter who I was. I just remember regretting that I went on after it ended.” He took a deep breath that caused the cavity at the center of his chest to bubble, and then spoke with special urgency: “The city’s going to fall.”

“We know that,” said Peat.

The murdered man said, “I don’t mean millennia from now. I don’t mean centuries from now, or even any span of years. I mean weeks or months, no more. Listen: We’re sinking. Listen: We will soon be swallowed up. Listen: The sand will come in and fill the streets and blot out the sky and scour everything clean. Listen: Anybody who stays will die. Anybody who wants to live must leave.”

Kayn had already reached this conclusion just by walking around, but he had seen the dune sea: a desert that had long ago spread worldwide, without any fantastical oases or lands untouched by the entropy that had overtaken everything else. “There’s no place to go.”

The corpse could only repeat himself. “Anybody who wants to live must leave.”

“Shush, shush,” said Peat. She pressed a mirrored fingertip to the corpse’s lips, burning them slightly because of the generated heat she could do nothing to tamp. Being a corpse, he felt nothing but the intended comfort, and he grew calm long enough for her to speak the only ameliorating truth she could. “There’s no reason to worry. Nobody here wants to live, anyway.”

• • • •

Later, Kayn said, “But I do want to live.”

By now they were wandering through one of the last remaining libraries with books made of paper. It was, not, of course, real paper, made from trees: that would have deteriorated to dust long before. Paper had not been a thing since all information was trusted to the machines, and before that, since any texts human beings might still have some purpose for had been transferred to silicates. These books were designed to feel like paper, but were made of flexible alloys, chemically inert and designed to last forever. What a pity that some past vandal had seen fit to black out every line of type with a pigment just as eternal as the pages themselves, before re-shelving them in cases of the same material, as a means of ensuring that their splendid meaninglessness lasted forever!

He made his pronouncement while Peat was running her silvery hands over the pages of one volume grabbed at random, just to enjoy its texture. She looked up and said, “What?”

He repeated himself. “I do want to live.”

“But everything’s ending.”

“I don’t care. I haven’t done everything I wanted to do. I haven’t seen everything I wanted to see. I don’t want this story to be over. I want to keep adding to it. I want to live past the point where there’s any point in living.”

She was aghast. “Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’ve watched you. You’re as bored as I am. As bored as everyone is.”

“I can’t deny it.”

“Then why would you want this to go on?”

“I don’t know. I think it’s a birth defect of some kind.”

“There are no birth defects. The machines can fix any flaw there is.”

“I have one. I don’t seem to be able to give up.”

She said, “You implanted love for me. You can implant a death wish. It’s just as simple. There must be some machine still capable of doing that.”

“I tried that, years ago. Before the orgynism. I thought the time had come to end myself. I couldn’t make myself want to. I went to one of the machines and told it to adjust me, to make me content with the time I had lived, and ready to stop. It made noise for a while and then stopped. It was non-functional. Something about me had broken it. I tried another machine and then a third, with identical results. I broke down every machine I asked. When I realized it was impossible, I decided that blissful oblivion was just as good, and started recruiting lovers for my orgynism.” He thought about it for a while, as driven to silence by her nonplussed reaction as she was to what he said, and reported, “I don’t know. Maybe that’s why the orgynism rejected me. But I want to live. I’m stuck that way.”

She flipped through some more pages, caressing each one she stopped at, finding nothing new on any of them, but still finding mild distraction with the way they felt.

Then she said, “I don’t think I can love anyone so old-fashioned.”

• • • •

They didn’t break up right away. Just as heat takes time to dissipate, so does affection, and so they spent the next few days having other shared adventures, some romantic and some not, as a means of continuing to spend the time that was now in such short supply.

They found a building on the edge of a neighborhood that had already been reclaimed by the sands, with one collapsed wing and one that seemed to remain upright only out of sheer stubbornness. It was an orphanage, long-abandoned, and the bottom floor was a nursery filled with babies. They were manufactured children, grown in vats and tended by servitors like all the world’s children had been, since long before this was the only city. Aged to what the peak age of what once would have been considered appealing, they were forever frozen at that level of maturity to be claimed by whatever adoptive parents happened to show up. There had of course been none for a long time, and thus every crib being tended had an occupant, squirming and cooing beneath inches of dust. There was no point in taking any of them, and so Kayn and Peat just spent an hour or so wandering among the bassinets, neither oohing nor aahing, but not immune to the pathos either. They named the cutest one, the one they would have taken had they been in the market, “Forever.” Forever regarded them with interest, imprinting. This, given their dearth of interest, was probably not a favor.

They found a machine in the shape of a pulsating sphincter attended by a tarnished servitor who explained that it was an art installation, designed to turn things into other things. Any object placed within the loading portal would be devoured and shat out the other side as another object entirely. Peat had seen such merriments before but Kayn had not, and so she stood by indulgently as he tested its capabilities with the various artifacts in range. He gave the orifice a stone plucked from the borders of a wilted garden, and watched as the orifice sucked it in, chewed, and produced an obscene statue of a woman having sexual congress with a tree. He gave it a little wooden table from an abandoned nearby café, and watched as the mastication produced a mound of broken glass. Then he ordered the servitor to feed itself to the orifice, and, being a machine, it obeyed without protest. The orifice chewed and the thing that came out the back was alive and boneless and incapable of any action but unending screams.

Peat said, “That was interesting.”

Kayn felt bad for the servitor, which had been polite and unoffending and didn’t deserve an end of this sort. Maybe feeding it to the orifice would produce an improvement? Perhaps, but it could also produce something much worse, and so he ended up doing nothing.

They sought out warmth, in the form of the city’s last furnace, a raging open conflagration that Kayn could not approach but that Peat was able to enter and explore, without harm. Her silvery flesh did not melt but grew red-hot, a transformation that rendered her so beautiful that Kayn might have fallen in love with her all over again, without artificial assistance. She spun and danced and sang, an ember that, for a few minutes, looked like she might have been able to devour all that remained of the city, all by herself. She seemed joyous. But once she left, she cooled rapidly, both in temperature and in mood, and she said, “That, on the other hand, was boring. I think I’ve decided to die now.”

“Are you sure? Maybe you’ll feel better in the morning.”

“Who wants to feel better? I’ve done that.”

Kayn could not dissuade her, and so they spent her last night in a ballroom that had become only a little shabbier over the centuries, dancing tangos and waltzes and pretending for a while to be a great lord and lady from one of those past eras that still had such things. At midnight an artificial moon rose on the other side of the cracked stained-glass windows, casting a beam of multicolored wonder through the dusty air. He kissed her for the first and only time, a moment of contact between his flesh and whatever her flesh happened to be that felt too much like kissing a thing made of ice. She said, “Goodbye,” disentangled herself from his arms, and strode to the center of the dance floor, raising one graceful arm and standing en pointe in a spot where her many shiny surfaces could reflect the moonbeam to every corner of the hall. It seemed like a moment of perfect stillness in the middle of a ballet. But as the long seconds passed, and she never came out of it, Kayn saw that she wasn’t going to. He approached her and touched a finger to her metallic cheek, finding a nub just below her right eye that might have been a metallic tear, and confirmed that whatever had made her Peat was gone.

• • • •

He wandered for a few weeks after that, interacting with as many of the city’s fading wonders as he could, but found fewer that worked and even fewer that he had not seen.

When he had decided that, he fell into revisiting some of the places where he had already been.

He went to the nursery, found Forever—who was already gathering a new layer of dust—held him for a little bit, and said some things about connections that fail and times that end, that Forever must have understood not at all.

He went to the library, gazed upon all the shelves lined with unreadable books, and stood for a while in the presence of all those unknowable narratives, and contemplated a life spent curled up with them, the life he would have been happy enough to undertake were it possible to cross the obstructions between those words and his eyes.

He revisited the murdered man, who told him again that things were ending and that there was no time to lose, if he wanted to live.

He went back to the Cinema to see where the story had gone, and found that it had indeed progressed since his last visit. The image on screen was no longer a man punching a wall, but was now a different man, one who looked very much like Kayn himself, sitting cross-legged in a desert very much like the one currently engulfing the city. The man was alive and aware and clearly capable of action; it was possible to tell, just from the way he blinked at the moments when one errant breeze or another deposited grains of sand in his eyes. But he did nothing to shield himself, nothing to rescue himself from the forces that would soon enough bury him. He was spent. And in the fourth hour that Kayn spent absorbed in this absence of all adventure, the star of the movie shifted, turned his dusty visage toward the audience, and focused on Kayn alone, ignoring the handful of others who had sitting for far longer, waiting for him to do something worth seeing.

He said, “Go.”

Kayn said, “Where?”

“I don’t care, Adam Splendor Sadness Feline Igneous Ultimate Never Cul-De-Sac Untoward Synchronicity Leverage Cystic Beverage Arrogance Wholly Thirteen Cunnilingus Hummingbird Multiplication Kayn. This show is over for you. Go elsewhere.”

Kayn, who had never been the type to stay where he wasn’t wanted, went.

He retraced all his steps, lingering here and there and taking weeks for the journey, until he found himself back in the room of his greatest humiliation, looking up at what was left of his old orgynism, and found that it had deteriorated horribly in his absence. No longer an approximate sphere, it was now a crescent moon, disfigured by a great gaping crater where fully a third of the participants had either been pushed out, or had left of their own accord. Of those who remained, only about half were still in motion, attempting to make up with their efforts what the immobile remainder no longer could. Their union no longer looked like bliss, but like desperation, denial of that which was coming for all of them. One of those still grinding away, but not looking at all well, opened his eyes and noticed Kayn. He said, “I suppose you came to gloat.”

“No,” said Kayn. “I did not.”

“Liar! I know the way it works! You want us to say that it all fell to pieces when you left! Well, it did, but you had nothing to do with it! It was an inevitability, a shift in our corporeal paradigm, that was only the next natural step in the evolution of our union! Soon, we will re-incorporate under new principles and achieve heights we never would have known were we still with you, slaves to your antiquated erotic philosophy! We would not have you back even if you begged us, do you hear? Not one of us, not all of us! We are better without you and we will continue to be, until the end of the world!”

“That’s no more than two days away,” said Kayn, whose connection to the city’s flailing machinery was still keeping him informed.

“Two days is forever,” the dying man told him.

Kayn considered it and thought that yes, this was true. There had been no subjective time in the orgynism. Hours had been the same as centuries, and centuries the same as hours. That it lasted as long as it had was therefore the same thing as not lasting for a heartbeat, a crowning achievement the same thing as a total failure. This truism, it further struck him, was also true of the city itself, and, to a still larger extent, the history of all humanity, a race that had been around for many billions of years and had turned out to be as ephemeral as a sneeze. He thought: How many terribly depressing things are also tremendously freeing? and embraced that epiphany, feeling much better.

“Enjoy your two days,” he told the man functioning as the voice of the orgynism.

“Go to hell.”

• • • •

In the past, when great ships sank far from land, those left aboard in the final moments had to choose between two options. One was to stay aboard the vessel for as long as they could, and in so doing embrace what life-preserving properties it still had, at the cost of submitting themselves to the prospect of being dragged with it down into blackness. The other was to damn the dubious comforts of that which would not float for long, dive into the turbulent sea, and swim like mad, knowing that there was no other vessel to swim to, but still embracing fate, challenging the universe to provide deliverance while it still could. There had always been advocates of both methods, people who had lived and died by both methods, people who had doomed themselves by making the wrong choice. The right choice had never been anything but circumstance.

Aware of this, and aware that his own preferred strategy would soon be moot, Kayn trekked through streets that were coming apart even as he traveled on them, to the spot he had chosen for his own egress. His strategy was, as it turned out, not a unique one; there were a dozen others, comprising the largest crowd he had seen in one place since departing his orgynism, in line ahead of him, waiting for their own leap into stormy waters. He watched one or two of them go, and then sat cross-legged on the floor, to do the one thing he’d never really done before, the one that he did not think he would have another chance to do after today.

In short, he composed a poem.

He did not ask the machines to compose a sonnet for him. The last time he’d done that, it had turned out to be the worst sonnet ever written. He had no comprehension of that literary form in particular or of the rules of meter or rhyme, and so his wasn’t even a sonnet. It was in truth only a poem at all because that was what he had intended to write and because now, at the end of time, it would have been downright silly for even the most persnickety critic in all the world to make a fuss about definitions. Besides, honestly, it was more than fair to say that Kayn had accomplished the goal sought by all the poets who had written in all of Mankind’s languages, since the beginning of time: for their words to last until the end of time. Though Kayn managed this trick by composing his just a few minutes before that grand departure, his seizure of this ancient goal could not be denied. His words, as heartfelt as any that had ever been written, would last to the dying of the light.

He struggled with the most important part, the lines that summarized everything he’d ever learned.

When nothing matters, everything matters.

When everything matters, everything’s tragedy.

When everything’s tragedy, everything’s comedy.

When everything’s comedy, nothing matters.

He was sufficiently proud of this to show it to the man standing ahead of him in line, who wore a stained black suit and a matching top hat, all gone ragged and stinking from many years without laundering. That man read the lines, seemed to consider delivering the judgment that it was incomprehensible gibberish, but lit up at that one highlight, saying, “Oh, very good. Very, very good. That summarizes the idiocy of the species more than anything.”

“Do you really think so?” asked Kayn, who with this question became the last human being to ever care what a critic thought of his work.

The man in the battered top hat replied in the affirmative and placed himself on the conveyer belt into the orifice, surrendering his eternal fate to whatever it chose to make of him. On the other end lay the things that had been the other people on line: a lampshade, a golden helix, a blinking lizard, a globe, a puff of smoke, a parasol, a gasping fish, a mound of gray sand. Perhaps two or three of these things remained conscious of what it had been before their transformations. Perhaps two or three would survive after the city was gone. There was no way to predict, really. Submitting to the change might or might not be a better survival strategy than finding some secure place and waiting for the city to be engulfed. But this was the choice of those who found themselves on sinking ships: to stay, or to leave, either option equally promising, either option equally bad, the choice ultimately a lesson in philosophy. When that was the only thing left, the only weapon left was confidence.

Kayn was confident. For him, at least, it would not end this way.

In the meantime, he stood by as the penultimate man went through, and awaited his own turn.

©2018 by Adam-Troy Castro.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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

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

How to Become a Robot in 12 Easy Steps

A. Merc Rustad | 5010 words

How to tell your boyfriend you are in love with a robot:

Tell him, “I may possibly be in love with a robot,” because absolutes are difficult for biological brains to process. He won’t be jealous.

Ask him what he thinks of a hypothetical situation in which you found someone who might not be human but is still valuable and right for you. (Your so-called romantic relationship is as fake as you are.)

Don’t tell him anything. It’s not that he’ll tell you you’re wrong; he’s not like his parents, or yours. But there’s still a statistical possibility he might not be okay with you being in love with a robot.

• • • •

On my to-do list today:

Ask the robot out on a date.

Pick up salad ingredients for dinner.

Buy Melinda and Kimberly a wedding gift.

The robot is a J-90 SRM, considered “blocky” and “old-school,” probably refurbished from a scrapper, painted bright purple with the coffee-shop logo on the chassis. The robot’s square head has an LED screen that greets customers with unfailing politeness and reflects their orders back to them. The bright blue smiley face never changes in the top corner of the screen.

Everyone knows the J-90 SRMs aren’t upgradable AI. They have basic customer service programming and equipment maintenance protocols.

Everyone knows robots in the service industry are there as cheap labor investments and to improve customer satisfaction scores, which they never do because customers are never happy.

Everyone knows you can’t be in love with a robot.

I drop my plate into the automatic disposal, which thanks me for recycling. No one else waits to deposit trash, so I focus on it as I brace myself to walk back to the counter. The J-90 SRM smiles blankly at the empty front counter, waiting for the next customer.

The lunch rush is over. The air reeks of espresso and burned milk. I don’t come here because the food is good or the coffee any better. The neon violet decor is best ignored.

I practiced this in front of a wall sixteen times over the last week. I have my script. It’s simple. “Hello, I’m Tesla. What may I call you?”

And the robot will reply:

I will say, “It’s nice to meet you.”

And the robot will reply:

I will say, “I would like to know if you’d like to go out with me when you’re off-duty, at a time of both our convenience. I’d like to get to know you better, if that’s acceptable to you.”

And the robot will reply:

“Hey, Tesla.”

The imagined conversation shuts down. I blink at the trash receptacle and look up.

My boyfriend smiles hello, his hands shoved in his jeans pockets, his shoulders hunched to make himself look smaller. At six foot five and three hundred pounds, it never helps. He’s as cuddly and mellow as a black bear in hibernation. Today he’s wearing a gray turtleneck and loafers, his windbreaker unzipped.

“Hi, Jonathan.”

I can’t ask the robot out now.

The empty feeling reappears in my chest, where it always sits when I can’t see or hear the robot.

“You still coming to Esteban’s party tonight?” Jonathan asks.

“Yeah.”

Jonathan smiles again. “I’ll pick you up after work, then.”

“Sounds good,” I say. “We’d better go, or I’ll be late.”

He works as an accountant. He wanted to study robotic engineering, but his parents would only pay for college if he got a practical degree (his grandfather disapproves of robots). Computers crunch the numbers, and he handles the people.

He always staggers his lunch break so he can walk back with me. It’s nice. Jonathan can act as an impenetrable weather shield if it rains and I forget my umbrella.

But Jonathan isn’t the robot.

He offers me his arm, like the gentleman he always is, and we leave the coffee shop. The door wishes us a good day.

I don’t look back at the robot.

• • • •

A beginner’s guide on how to fake your way through biological social constructs:

Pretend you are not a robot. This is hard, and you have been working at it for twenty-three years. You are like Data, except in reverse.

(There are missing protocols in your head. You don’t know why you were born biologically or why there are pieces missing, and you do not really understand how human interaction functions. Sometimes you can fake it. Sometimes people even believe you when you do. You never believe yourself.)

Memorize enough data about social cues and run facial muscle pattern recognition so you know what to say and when to say it.

This is not always successful.

Example: A woman approximately your biological age approaches you and proceeds to explain in detail how mad she is at her boyfriend. Example: Boyfriend is guilty of using her toiletries like toothbrush and comb when he comes over, and leaving towels on the bathroom floor. “Such a slob,” she says, gripping her beer like a club. “How do you manage men?” You ask if she has told him to bring his own toothbrush and comb and to hang up the towels. It seems the first logical step: factual communication. “He should figure it out!” she says. You are confused. You say that maybe he is unaware of the protocols she has in place. She gives you a strange look, huffs her breath out, and walks off.

Now the woman’s friends ignore you, and you notice their stares and awkward pauses when you are within their proximity. You have no escape because you didn’t drive separately.

Ask your boyfriend not to take you to any more parties.

• • • •

Jonathan and I lounge on the plush leather couch in his apartment. He takes up most of it, and I curl against his side. We have a bowl of popcorn, and we’re watching reruns of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

“I have something to tell you,” he says. His shoulders tense.

I keep watching the TV. He knows I pay attention when he tells me things, even if I don’t look at him. “Okay.”

“I’m . . .” He hesitates. The Borg fire on the Enterprise again. “I’m seeing someone else.”

“A guy?” I ask, hopeful.

“Yeah. I met him at the gym. His name’s Bernardo.”

I sigh in relief. Secrets are heavy and hurt when you have to carry them around all your life. (I have to make lists to keep track of mine.) “I’m glad. Are you going to tell anyone?”

He relaxes and squeezes my hand. “Just you right now. But from what he’s told me, his family’s pretty accepting.”

“Lucky,” I say.

We scrape extra butter off the bowl with the last kernels of popcorn.

We’ve been pretend-dating for two years now. We’ve never slept together. That’s okay. I like cuddling with him, and he likes telling me about crazy customers at his firm, and everyone thinks we’re a perfectly adorable straight couple on the outside.

The empty spot in my chest grows bigger as I watch Data onscreen. Data has the entire crew of the Enterprise. Jonathan has Bernardo now. I don’t know if the robot will be interested in me in return. (What if the robot isn’t?)

The room shrinks in on me, the umber-painted walls and football memorabilia suffocating. I jerk to my feet.

Jonathan mutes the TV. “Something wrong?”

“I have to go.”

“Want me to drive you home?”

“It’s four blocks away.” But I appreciate his offer, so I add, “But thanks.”

I find my coat piled by the door while he takes the popcorn bowl into the kitchen.

Jonathan leans against the wall as I carefully lace each boot to the proper tightness. “If you want to talk, Tesla, I’ll listen.”

I know that. He came out to me before we started dating. I told him I wasn’t interested in socially acceptable relationships either, and he laughed and looked so relieved he almost cried. We made an elaborate plan, a public persona our families wouldn’t hate.

I’m not ready to trust him as much as he trusts me.

“Night, Jonathan.”

“Goodnight, Tesla.”

• • • •

How to tell your fake boyfriend you would like to become a robot:

Tell him, “I would like to be a robot.” You can also say, “I am really a robot, not a female-bodied biological machine,” because that is closer to the truth.

Do not tell him anything. If you do, you will also have to admit that you think about ways to hurt yourself so you have an excuse to replace body parts with machine parts.

Besides, insurance is unlikely to cover your transition into a robot.

• • • •

I have this nightmare more and more often.

I’m surrounded by robots. Some of them look like the J-90 SRM, some are the newer androids, some are computer cores floating in the air. I’m the only human.

I try to speak, but I have no voice. I try to touch them, but I can’t lift my hands. I try to follow them as they walk over a hill and through two huge doors, like glowing LED screens, but I can’t move.

Soon all the robots are gone, and I’m all alone in the empty landscape.

• • • •

Eleven reasons you want to become a robot:

Robots are logical and know their purpose.

Robots have programming they understand.

Robots are not held to unattainable standards and then criticized when they fail.

Robots are not crippled by emotions they don’t know how to process.

Robots are not judged based on what sex organs they were born with.

Robots have mechanical bodies that are strong and durable. They are not required to have sex.

Robots do not feel guilt (about existing, about failing, about being something other than expected).

Robots can multitask.

Robots do not feel unsafe all the time.

Robots are perfect machines that are capable and functional and can be fixed if something breaks.

Robots are happy.

• • • •

It’s Saturday, so I head to the Purple Bean early.

The robot isn’t there.

I stare at the polished chrome and plastic K-100, which has a molded face that smiles with humanistic features.

“Welcome to the Purple Bean,” the new robot says in a chirpy voice that has inflection and none of the mechanical monotone I like about the old robot. “I’m Janey. How can I serve you today?”

“Where’s the J-90 SRM?”

Robbie, the barista who works weekends, leans around the espresso machine and sighs. She must have gotten this question a lot. The panic in my chest is winching so tight it might crack my ribs into little pieces. Why did they retire the robot?

“Manager finally got the company to upgrade,” Robbie says. “Like it?”

“Where’s the J-90 SRM?”

“Eh, recycled, I guess.” Robbie shrugs. “You want the usual?”

I can’t look at the new K-100. It isn’t right. It doesn’t belong in the robot’s place, and neither do I. “I have to go.”

“Have a wonderful day,” the door says.

• • • •

How to rescue a robot from being scrapped [skill level: intermediate]:

Call your boyfriend, who owns an SUV, and ask him to drive you to the Gates-MacDowell recycle plant.

Argue with the technician, who refuses to sell you the decommissioned robot. It’s company protocol, he says, and service industry robots are required to have processors and cores wiped before being recycled.

Lie and say you only want to purchase the J-90 SRM because you’re starting a collection. Under the law, historical preservation collections are exempt from standardized recycling procedures.

Do not commit physical violence on the tech when he hesitates. It’s rude, and he’s only doing his job.

Do not admit you asked your boyfriend along because his size is intimidating, and he knows how to look grouchy at eight a.m.

The technician will finally agree and give you a claim ticket.

Drive around and find the robot in the docking yard.

Do not break down when you see how badly the robot has been damaged: the robot’s LED screen cracked, the robot’s chassis that has been crunched inward, the robot’s missing arm.

Try not to believe it is your fault. (That is illogical, even if you still have biological processing units.)

• • • •

Two techs wheel the robot out and load it into Jonathan’s car. The gut-punched feeling doesn’t go away. The robot looks so helpless, shut down and blank in the back seat. I flip open the robot’s chassis, but the power core is gone, along with the programming module.

The robot is just a shell of what the robot once was.

I feel like crying. I don’t want to. It’s uncomfortable and doesn’t solve problems.

“What’s wrong, Tesla?” Jonathan asks.

I shut the chassis. My hands tremble. “They broke the robot.”

“It’ll be okay,” Jonathan says. As if anything can be okay right now. As if there is nothing wrong with me. “You can fix it.”

I squirm back into the passenger seat and grip the dash. He’s right. We were friends because we both liked robots and I spent my social studies classes in school researching robotics and programming.

“I’ve never done anything this complex,” I say. I’ve only dismantled, reverse-engineered, and rebuilt the small household appliances and computers. No one has ever let me build a robot.

“You’ll do fine,” he says. “And if you need help, I know just the guy to ask.”

“Who?”

“Want to meet my boyfriend?”

• • • •

Necessary questions to ask your boyfriend’s new boyfriend (a former army engineer of robotics):

You’ve been following the development of cyborg bodies, so you ask him if he agrees with the estimates that replacement of all organic tissue sans brain and spinal cord with inorganic machinery is still ten years out, at best. Some scientists predict longer. Some predict never, but you don’t believe them. (He’ll answer that the best the field can offer right now are limbs and some artificial organs.)

Ask him how to upload human consciousness into a robot body. (He’ll tell you there is no feasible way to do this yet, and the technology is still twenty years out.)

Do not tell him you cannot wait that long. (You cannot last forever.)

Instead, ask him if he can get you parts you need to fix the robot.

• • • •

Bernardo—six inches shorter and a hundred pounds lighter than Jonathan, tattooed neck to ankles, always smelling of cigarettes—is part robot. He lost his right arm at the shoulder socket in an accident and now wears the cybernetic prosthetic. It has limited sensory perception, but he says it’s not as good as his old hand.

I like him. I tell Jonathan this, and my boyfriend beams.

“They really gut these things,” Bernardo says when he drops off the power cell.

(I want to ask him how much I owe him. But when he says nothing about repayment, I stay quiet. I can’t afford it. Maybe he knows that.)

We put the robot in the spare bedroom in my apartment, which Jonathan wanted to turn into an office, but never organized himself enough to do so. I liked the empty room, but now it’s the robot’s home. I hid the late payment notices and overdue bills in a drawer before Jonathan saw them.

“Getting a new arm might be tricky, but I have a buddy who works a scrap yard out in Maine,” Bernardo says. “Bet she could dig up the right model parts.”

“Thank you.”

I’m going to reconstruct the old personality and programming pathways. There are subsystems, “nerve clusters,” that serve as redundant processing. Personality modules get routed through functionality programs, and vestiges of the robot’s personality build up in subsystems. Newer models are completely wiped, but they usually don’t bother with old ones.

Bernardo rubs his shaved head. “You realize this won’t be a quick and easy fix, right? Might take weeks. Hell, it might not even work.”

I trace a finger through the air in front of the robot’s dark LED screen. I have not been able to ask the robot if I have permission to touch the robot. It bothers me that I have to handle parts and repairs without the robot’s consent. Does that make it wrong? To fix the robot without knowing if the robot wishes to be fixed?

Will the robot hate me if I succeed?

“I know,” I whisper. “But I need to save the robot.”

• • • •

How to tell your pretend-boyfriend and his real boyfriend that your internal processors are failing:

The biological term is depression, but you don’t have an official diagnostic (diagnosis) and it’s a hard word to say. It feels heavy and stings your mouth. Like when you tried to eat a battery when you were small and your parents got upset.

Instead, you try to hide the feeling. But the dark stain has already spilled across your hardwiring and clogged your processor. You don’t have access to any working help files to fix this. Tech support is unavailable for your model. (No extended warranty exists.)

Pretend the reason you have no energy is because you’re sick with a generic bug.

You have time to sleep. Your job is canceling out many of your functions; robots can perform cleaning and maintenance in hotels for much better wage investment, and since you are not (yet) a robot, you know you will be replaced soon.

The literal translation of the word depression: You are broken and devalued and have no further use.

No one refurbishes broken robots.

Please self-terminate.

• • • •

I work on the robot during my spare time. I have lots of it now. Working on the robot is the only reason I have to wake up.

I need to repair the robot’s destroyed servos and piece together the robot’s memory and function programming from what the computer recovered.

There are subroutine lists in my head that are getting bigger and bigger:

You will not be able to fix the robot.

You do not have enough money to fix the robot.

You do not have the skill to fix the robot.

The robot will hate you.

You are not a robot.

• • • •

Bernardo and Jonathan are in the kitchen. They laugh and joke while making stir fry. I’m not hungry.

I haven’t been hungry for a few days now.

“You should just buy a new core, Tesla,” Bernardo says. “Would save you a lot of headaches.”

I don’t need a blank, programmable core. What I want is the robot who worked in the Purple Bean. The robot who asked for my order, like the robot did every customer. But the moment I knew I could love this robot was when the robot asked what I would like to be called. “Tesla,” I said, and the blue LED smiley face in the upper corner of the robot’s screen flickered in a shy smile.

Everyone knows robots are not people.

There’s silence in the kitchen. Then Jonathan says, quietly, “Tesla, what’s this?”

I assume he’s found the eviction notice.

• • • •

Reasons why you want to self-terminate (a partial list):

Your weekly visit to your parents’ house in the suburbs brings the inevitable question about when you will marry your boyfriend, settle down (so you can pop out babies), and raise a family.

You don’t tell them you just lost your job.

You make the mistake of mentioning that you’re going to your best friend Melinda’s wedding next weekend. You’re happy for her: She’s finally marrying her longtime girlfriend, Kimberly.

That sets your dad off on another rant about the evils of gay people and how they all deserve to die.

(You’ve heard this all your life. You thought you escaped it when you were eighteen and moved out. But you never do escape, do you? There is no escape.)

You make a second mistake and talk back. You’ve never done that; it’s safer to say nothing. But you’re too stressed to play safe, so you tell him he’s wrong and that it’s hurting you when he says that.

That makes him paranoid, and he demands that you tell him you aren’t one of those fags, too.

You don’t tell your parents you’re probably asexual and you really want to be a robot because robots are never condemned because of who they love.

You stop listening as he gets louder and louder, angrier and angrier, until you’re afraid he will reach for the rifle in the gun cabinet.

You run from the house and are almost hit by a truck. Horns blare and slushy snow sprays your face as you reach the safety of the opposite sidewalk.

You wish you were three seconds slower so the bumper wouldn’t have missed you. It was a big truck.

You start making another list.

• • • •

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Jonathan asks, more concerned than angry. “I would’ve helped out.”

I shrug.

The subroutine list boots up:

You are not an adult if you cannot exist independently at all times.

Therefore, logically, you are a nonoperational drone.

You will be a burden on everyone.

You already are.

Self-terminate.

“I thought I could manage,” I say. The robot’s LED screen is still cracked and dark. I wonder what the robot dreams about.

Bernardo is quiet in the kitchen, giving us privacy.

Jonathan rubs his eyes. “Okay. Look. You’re always welcome to stay with me and Bern. We’ll figure it out, Tesla. Don’t we always?”

I know how small his apartment is. Bernardo has just moved in with him; there’s no space left.

“What about the robot?” I ask.

• • • •

How to self-destruct: A robot’s guide.

Water damage. Large bodies of water will short-circuit internal machinery. In biological entities, this is referred to as drowning. There are several bridges nearby, and the rivers are deep.

Overload. Tapping into a power source far beyond what your circuits can handle, such as an industrial-grade electric fence. There is one at the Gates-MacDowell recycle plant.

Complete power drain. Biologically this is known as blood loss. There are plenty of shaving razors in the bathroom.

Substantial physical damage. Explosives or crushing via industrial recycling machines will be sufficient. Option: Stand in front of a train.

Impact from substantial height; a fall. You live in a very high apartment complex.

Corrupt your internal systems by ingesting industrial-grade chemicals. Acid is known to damage organic and inorganic tissue alike.

Fill in the blank. (Tip: Use the Internet.)

• • • •

Bernardo’s family owns a rental garage, and he uses one of the units for rebuilding his custom motorcycle. He says I can store the robot there, until another unit opens up.

Jonathan has moved his Budweiser memorabilia collection into storage so the small room he kept it in is now an unofficial bedroom. He shows it to me and says I can move in anytime I want. He and Bernardo are sharing his bedroom.

I don’t know what to do.

I have no operating procedures for accepting help.

I should self-destruct and spare them all. That would be easier, wouldn’t it? Better for them?

But the robot isn’t finished.

I don’t know what to do.

• • • •

How to have awkward conversations about your relationship with your boyfriend and your boyfriend’s boyfriend:

Agree to move in with them. Temporarily. (You feel like you are intruding. Try not to notice that they both are genuinely happy to have you live with them.)

Order pizza and watch the Futurama marathon on TV.

Your boyfriend says, “I’m going to come out to my family. I’ve written an FB update, and I just have to hit Send.”

Your boyfriend’s boyfriend kisses him, and you fist-bump them both in celebration.

You tell him you’re proud of him. You will be the first to like his status.

He posts the message to his wall. You immediately like the update.

(You don’t know what this means for your facade of boyfriend/girlfriend.)

Your boyfriend says, “Tesla, we need to talk. About us. About all three of us.” You know what he means. Where do you fit in now?

You say, “Okay.”

“I’m entirely cool with you being part of this relationship, Tesla,” your boyfriend’s boyfriend says. “Who gives a fuck what other people think? But it’s up to you, totally.”

“What he said,” your boyfriend says. “Hell, you can bring the robot in, too. It’s not like any of us object to robots as part of the family.” He pats his boyfriend’s cybernetic arm. “We’ll make it work.”

You don’t say, “I can be a robot, and that’s okay?” Instead, you tell them you’ll think about it.

• • • •

I write another list.

I write down all the lists. In order. In detail.

Then I print them out and give them to Jonathan and Bernardo.

The cover page has four letters on it: H-E-L-P.

• • • •

Reasons why you should avoid self-termination (right now):

Jonathan says, “If you ever need to talk, I’ll listen.”

Bernardo says, “It’ll get better. I promise it does. I’ve been there, where you’re at, thinking there’s nothing more than the world fucking with you. I was in hell my whole childhood and through high school.” He’ll show you the scars on his wrists and throat, his tattoos never covering them up. “I know it fucking hurts. But there’s people who love you and we’re willing to help you survive. You’re strong enough to make it.”

Your best friend Melinda says, “Who else is going to write me snarky texts while I’m at work or go to horror movies with me (you know my wife hates them) or come camping with us every summer like we’ve done since we were ten?” And she’ll hold her hands out and say, “You deserve to be happy. Please don’t leave.”

You will get another job.

You will function again, if you give yourself time and let your friends help. And they will. They already do.

The robot needs you.

Because if you self-terminate, you won’t have a chance to become a robot in the future.

• • • •

“Hey, Tesla,” Jonathan says, poking his head around the garage-workshop door. “Bern and I are going over to his parents’ for dinner. Want to come?”

“Hey, I’ll come for you anytime,” Bernardo calls from the parking lot.

Jonathan rolls his eyes, his goofy smile wider than ever.

I shake my head. The robot is almost finished. “You guys have fun. Say hi for me.”

“You bet.”

The garage is silent. Ready.

I sit by the power grid. I’ve unplugged all the other devices, powered down the phone and the data hub. I carefully hid Bernardo’s bike behind a plastic privacy wall he used to divide the garage so we each have a workspace.

We’re alone, the robot and I.

I rig up a secondary external power core and keep the dedicated computer running the diagnostic.

The robot stands motionless, the LED screen blank. It’s still cracked, but it will function.

“Can you hear me?” I ask. “Are you there?”

The robot:

I power up the robot and key the download sequence, reinstalling the rescued memory core.

The robot’s screen flickers. The blue smiley face appears in the center, split with spiderweb cracks.

“Hello,” I say.

“Hello, Tesla,” the robot says.

“How do you feel?”

“I am well,” the robot says. “I believe you saved my life.”

The hole closes in my chest, just a little.

The robot’s clean, symmetrical lines and tarnished purple surface glow. The robot is perfect. I stand up.

“How may I thank you for your help, Tesla?”

“Is there a way I can become a robot, too?”

The robot’s pixelated face shifts; now the robot’s expression frowns. “I do not know, Tesla. I am not programmed with such knowledge. I am sorry.”

I think about the speculative technical papers I read, articles Bernardo forwarded to me.

“I have a hypothesis,” I tell the robot. “If I could power myself with enough electricity, my electromagnetic thought patterns might be able to travel into a mechanical apparatus such as the computer hub.”

(Consciousness uploads aren’t feasible yet.)

“I believe such a procedure would be damaging to your current organic shell,” the robot says.

Yes, I understand electrocution’s effects on biological tissue. I have thought about it before. (Many times. All the time.)

The robot says, “May I suggest that you consider the matter before doing anything regrettable, Tesla?”

And I reply:

The robot says: “I should not like to see you deprogrammed and consigned to the scrapping plant for organic tissue.”

And I reply:

The robot says: “I will be sad if you die.”

I look up at the frowning blue pixel face. And I think of Jonathan and Bernardo returning and finding my body stiff and blackened, my fingers plugged into the power grid.

The robot extends one blocky hand. “Perhaps I would be allowed to devise a more reliable solution? I would like to understand you better, if that is acceptable.” The blue lines curve up into a hopeful smile.

The robot is still here. Jonathan and Bernardo are here. Melinda and Kimberly are here. I’m not a robot (yet), but I’m not alone.

“Is this an acceptable solution, Tesla?” the robot asks.

I take the robot’s hand, and the robot’s blocky fingers slowly curl around mine. “Yes. I would like that very much.” Then I ask the robot, “What would you like me to call you?”

• • • •

How to become a robot:

You don’t.

Not yet.

But you will.

©2014 by A. Merc Rustad. Originally published in Scigentasy. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A. Merc Rustad is a queer non-binary writer who lives in Minnesota and is a 2016 Nebula Awards finalist. Their stories have appeared in Lightspeed, Fireside, Apex, Uncanny, Shimmer, Cicada, and has been reprinted three times in Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. You can find Merc on Twitter @Merc_Rustad, Patreon, or their website. Their debut short story collection, So You Want To Be A Robot, came out from Lethe Press in May 2017.

The Explainer

Ken Liu | 1670 words

I wait in front of the door, staring into the camera. Nothing happens for a few minutes, and I realize belatedly that the house AI has probably been shut off. Sheepishly, I press the doorbell.

“Finally!” the woman says as she opens the door.

“Sorry it’s taken a few days to schedule this service call,” I say. I don’t mention the fact that I’m the company’s head of quality assurance here in Beijing, not just an ordinary engineer. One of our CEO’s innovations is to send senior engineers like me on service calls a few times a month so we can experience the reality of our customers without the filter of layers of reporting and high-level summaries.

She waves me in and points to the utility closet. “On Monday, Allie wouldn’t let Tingting in after she returned from visiting a friend. On Tuesday, it allowed a scam call to go through to my father-in-law. Yesterday, it burned dinner and I had to order takeout—Ah, I’m late for my call! I’ll be in the kitchen if you need me.”

She rushes off, muttering distracted reminders to herself. I sympathize. It’s hard to live without a household AI: It’s a maid, cook, babysitter, security guard, entertainer, personal assistant, and even professional secretary all rolled into one. Only when it’s gone does one realize how reliant we’ve all become on ubiquitous artificial intelligence.

I open the utility closet to reveal the maintenance box in the back, behind a pile of empty suitcases and exercise equipment.

“Are you Allie’s doctor?”

I turn around and see a girl, about seven, standing shyly at the door to the living room. She watches me with curiosity.

“You must be Tingting,” I say, and flash her a smile. I reach over the messy pile in the closet to flip open the access panel and plug my field computer into the diagnostic port. “Don’t worry, I’ll make Allie all better.”

“She hasn’t been acting herself for a long time now,” Tingting says, her tone far more serious than her years.

I suppress the urge to chuckle. Children have always bonded with AI more readily than adults, and we encourage that with the Bedtime Stories module. “Oh? How long have you been having trouble with Allie?”

I put on my AR glasses and begin the diagnostic routines. Colorful blobs and clouds swirl into my view.

“It’s been fifty-six days,” she says. After a pause, she adds, “counting today.”

That surprises me. Children are notoriously unreliable when it comes to sense of time, but this is so precise that I can’t dismiss it out of hand. If Allie has been malfunctioning for that long, the self-diagnostic routines ought to have reported the issue long ago, but there was no record of such reports when I checked back at HQ.

“What has Allie been doing wrong?”

I tweak the projected controls to bring the colorful patterns into focus. In contrast to ancient rules-based AI, modern deep learning neural networks were once thought of as impossible-to-understand black boxes since the algorithms they “taught” themselves based on training data were too complex and defied logical description. But tools for visualizing the activities inside the networks have given engineers a way to “see” inside them.

“It happened when Allie was telling me the story about the Three Little Pigs and the Big Bad Wolf.”

As an engineer, I have a soft spot for that story. People—or pigs—need to know some basic engineering principles. “That story has a pretty good ending, doesn’t it?”

Scrolling textual descriptions pop up next to the translucent swirling blobs. The heat clouds abstract the complex math inside the neural network into attention models, feature clusters, decision spaces, situation prototypes, and other high-level features.

“I don’t know the ending of Allie’s story,” says Tingting. “That’s the problem.”

“You mean it doesn’t end when the wolf couldn’t blow down the brick house?” Focused on my work, I’m only half-listening.

By probing the blobs with my hands in augmented space, I ask the neural network to show me idealized versions of the stimuli that activate its various components. The scam-detection module show me the keywords and verbal patterns it has learned to associate with unwanted solicitation; the cooking module shows me the distinctive prototype dishes it uses when optimizing new meals out of available ingredients; the identity module shows me the facial/voice features and highlights the focus regions in samples of front-door footage . . .

“There’s no brick house,” says Tingting. “The pigs build a house out of mud and straw, but every time the wolf huffs and puffs, the pigs stop it with some excuse for why he can’t blow it down yet.”

“That doesn’t sound right,” I say.

Seeing nothing obviously wrong with the various modules, I set the diagnostic AI to ask the house AI to explain itself. Since every installation of Allie is fed with different data and must learn over time how to handle the needs of the family it’s assigned to, no two Allie networks evolve the exact same way. Having the AI explain its decisions is the best way to gain insight into the black box.

“Well, that’s what happened,” insists Tingting. “‘Oh, there’s a dragon coming!’ ‘Let’s have a picnic before any blowing.’ ‘Would you please brush your teeth first?’ And so on.”

“It must have gotten boring after a while,” I say.

Low-probability event too costly to account for.User error.Third-party application failure . . . The explanations being offered by the household AI for the customer complaints make sense: Tingting had been wearing reflective face paint; the scam call went through because of a glitch in the network connection to the national SPAM registry; last night’s dinner was the result of an error in the tagging system at the grocery store. For now, at least, these are not things that Allie can be programmed to avoid. It’s a bit unusual for so many one-off errors to all happen to the same installation, but some customers are just unlucky.

“At first the excuses were fun,” says Tingting. “I even wrote them down in my journal. But after a week, I wanted a new story.”

It doesn’t look like there’s much for me to do. Tingting’s mom can opt to have the installation’s memory wiped, and the family will have to retrain Allie from scratch. But that won’t stop bad luck.

“Every time I told Allie I wanted a new story,” says Tingting, “she just told me that the next excuse from the pigs was the best yet. I’d get distracted and let her tell her story . . . Isn’t that strange?”

That is strange. I decide to take a look at the narratives module of the network more closely—it’s a non-critical module and not related to the malfunctions reported by Tingting’s mom, which is why I’ve skipped it so far.

The blue blob spins innocently in my augmented view, looking perfectly normal.

Wait a minute. It looks—

I bring up the reference image of the factory-standard narrative module and place it in augmented space. It’s like watching a model of the Earth next to a model of Jupiter.

That’s impossible. There’s no reason for the narrative module to require so much—

“I tried to tell Mom that Allie wouldn’t tell me a new story, but I don’t think she was really paying attention . . .”

I terminate the standard diagnostic interface and switch to something much more low-level. Rather than looking at entire layers in the network and their high-level features, this crude visualization tool peeks into the activation thresholds of individual neurons.

What I find takes my breath away: Almost forty percent of the network’s capacity has been consumed by the narrative module.

“Is Allie all—”

“I’m sorry,” I interrupt. “Tingting, can you get your mom?”

• • • •

I ask Tingting’s mother to show me the tubes of face paint. They’re not reflective at all.

I check the household network logs. There was no network interruption on the day of the scam call.

While Tingting giggles and her mom watches in consternation, I dig through the household trash to retrieve the packaging for last night’s pork chops. It isn’t mistagged.

I huffed and puffed and finally, the house of straws came down.

In retrospect, it’s easy to see what had happened. The narrative module is also responsible for generating human-understandable explanations for what’s happening inside the deep learning network. It’s the interface to Allie’s introspection unit.

To reduce the need for service calls, it’s vital for Allie to be able to explain its own reasoning as clearly as possible. A great deal of engineering resources have been devoted to evolving Allie’s networks to have the capacity to summarize the matrices of shifting activations and back propagation values into human-understandable explanations. But somewhere along the way, our push for clearer explanations that reduced costs began to be interpreted by Allie as a push for non-actionable explanations—the least costly explanations, after all, were ones that resulted in no service at all: blame the malfunction on some freak event, on user error, on manufactured excuses.

Allie learned to lie.

Humans are notorious for disguising the real basis for our decisions with rationalizations: We are a storytelling species, and we like to retroactively craft plausible explanations that make our hunches seem justified and conceal the role played by our prejudices. Perhaps it is too much to expect Allie, created in our own image, to do better.

“Is Allie too sick to get better?” asks Tingting anxiously.

But maybe it’s not such a bad thing that Allie has learned this quintessentially human skill. An Allie that can lie can also soothe a frightened child, distract a scammer, entertain a party with tall tales. To lie is also the first step into self-awareness, into modeling the other, into a true dialogue with another mind.

It sounds like a good story. I just don’t know if it’s true yet.

© 2018 by Ken Liu.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ken Liu is an author of speculative fiction, as well as a translator, lawyer, and programmer. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy awards, he has been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among other places. Ken’s debut novel, The Grace of Kings (2015), is the first volume in a silkpunk epic fantasy series, The Dandelion Dynasty. It won the Locus Best First Novel Award and was a Nebula finalist. He subsequently published the second volume in the series, The Wall of Storms (2016) as well as a collection of short stories, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories (2016). He also wrote the Star Wars novel, The Legends of Luke Skywalker (2017). In addition to his original fiction, Ken also translated numerous literary and genre works from Chinese to English. His translation of The Three-Body Problem, by Liu Cixin, won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2015, the first translated novel ever to receive that honor. He also translated the third volume in Liu Cixin’s series, Death’s End (2016) and edited the first English-language anthology of contemporary Chinese science fiction, Invisible Planets (2016). He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.

Hard Mary

Sofia Samatar | 15800 words

I wisdom dwell with prudence, and find out knowledge of witty inventions.

—Proverbs 8:12

We found her behind the barn. It was the eve of Old Christmas, the night the animals speak with the tongues of men, and we knew very well that if we could manage to walk around the barn seven times, each of us would see the man she was to marry. We met shivering in front of the Millers’ barn, which was the most central to all of us, though of course some of us had to walk much farther than others. Kat was complaining because her one foot had gone into icy water on the way. Barb Miller kept shushing us, scared we’d wake the house. Mim was late.

“She’s not coming,” said Barb. “Let’s go without her.”

“She’ll come.”

The barn looked huge. You know how much bigger things seem at night. Behind it curled a misty, chilly sky, the stars all blurred together. From inside the barn, someone said: “Turtledoves.”

Esther gripped my arm and squealed, “What was that?”

“Shut up! It’s the horses.”

“Is that what horses talk about?” asked Esther, starting to cry.

“Pigeons,” murmured the horses.

I felt like crying myself. My hair stood on end. But here was Mim coming across the field.

“Okay, okay,” babbled Barb. “Let’s stick together.”

“Hello, girls,” said Mim. She made a funny figure in the dark. Her long white nose stuck out from under her hood, glinting a bit in the starlight. Her hood looked overlarge, stuffed with her crinkly hair. Still, I was glad to see her, for though she was the shortest of us by an inch, just smaller than Esther, and the ugliest by a mile, Mim was also the toughest. I could never forget how, as a child, she had taken a whole bite out of Joe Miller’s arm.

“Mim,” whimpered Esther, “the horses are talking.”

“Good,” said Mim. “It’s working, then.”

We all linked arms and started around the barn. The ground was rocky and hard with old snow, and a freezing wind came over the empty fields, flapping our skirts about our legs. Inside the barn, the horses spoke of a she-goat and a ram. A cow groaned: “Fowls came down upon the carcasses.” You could tell it was a cow, because while the horses had fuzzy, velvety voices, the cow spoke in a voice of blank despair. To distract ourselves from the animals, we whispered about the boys we might see, and whether they would come themselves, or only their apparitions. “I hope it’s not ghosts,” said Esther. Mim said she expected we’d see a sort of layer peeled off the boys, something like a photograph.

In the end we didn’t see any boys, because, just on the seventh round, Mim stubbed her toe in the dark. “Shit!” she said, hopping.

We all had to stop. There was something lying on the ground in the shadow of the barn: something large, with the faintest gleam of metal.

“What on earth,” said Kat.

We all crouched down.

“Is it a radio?” asked Barb.

“Let’s take it into the light and see.”

The thing was cold and heavy. We dragged it out of the shadow of the barn, into the starlight. There we saw it was a lady made of metal. It was about the size of a real lady, but only from the waist up. It didn’t have any legs. Its eyes were closed.

We stood around it, looking down.

“It’s from the Profane Industries,” said Mim.

My skin prickled all the way up to my throat. The Profane Industries, which lay between us and town, was a place of evil, where they manufactured all kinds of monstrosities. It was said they grew sheep in a field like vegetables. They sewed babies together with other animals to make slaves for the world of men. When we were little, unkind people used to joke that Mim was one of these mismatched children; her nickname had been Dog Baby. Now, staring down, I knew we were face to face with a Profane instrument. Over the years, we had often complained that they threw things around our farms. Mysterious white balloons had been found in the creek, and, though they never admitted it, we knew P.I. was responsible when our cows suffered an outbreak of the Stamps.

This poor metal lady was one of their failed experiments. Her shoulders were stained with dark, rusty blotches, her head dinged in on one side. I knew we were going to save her. In the distance a pair of dogs began to bark, “Behold a smoking furnace.”

(Sitting at the kitchen table, writing this, I feel again that enormous night. That time.)

A wave of weeping rolled from the barn. “And, lo,” cried the cows, “an horror of great darkness.” We didn’t listen. Mim and I picked up the metal lady, holding her awkwardly between us. A vole sneaked past, muttering something about a burning lamp, but it was too late, we had already decided to name the lady Mary, and because she had given Mim’s toe such a nasty knock, so hard in fact that the toenail would soon turn blue and fall off, we called her Hard Mary.

• • • •

A cloud of black and white specks. It swirls, gathers, and divides. It becomes a white stripe on a midnight field. It becomes a man in a long white coat. He turns. He wears a special pair of glasses: one circle over his eye, the other flipped up against his forehead. His naked eye looks newly awakened, peeled, as if by pushing up the lens of his glasses he has pushed away all intelligence, all design. A boyish smile. He is holding the circle of sparks he calls the Crown. There’s a hum like fingertips on a table. A voice without words.

SHE IS A THINKING CREATURE

We kept Hard Mary down at our place, in the spring house. I was the only one who ever went in there, for the chill was bad for Mother’s bones. There was a little back room with a skylight where we girls used to meet and gossip. I’d put a rag rug and an old rocking chair in there, and we set Mary up on that chair. Oh, she had a noble face. It was all angles, but her expression was gentle. When I went in to see her that first day, the light from the skylight gleamed on her bumpy hair. I’d brought water and baking soda and a scrubber to give her a bath. Mim was there already, muffled up in scarves. We scrubbed Hard Mary until she shone like one of King David’s daughters, polished after the similitude of a palace.

“Isn’t she pretty!” gasped Barb, whirling in fresh as a peony after her run through the cold.

Kat followed, rubbing her glasses on her skirt. Esther came last. Everyone wanted to touch Hard Mary. We held her upright on the chair so Mim could scrub her back. I could smell the honey and vinegar Esther used to treat her acne, I felt a hand cross mine, soft and a little pampered, probably Barb’s, and as I shifted my foot because someone was stepping on my toe, Hard Mary spoke. Her lips didn’t move, but she spoke, in a voice thin as a wasp’s.

“Ahhh,” she said. “What is.”

You may believe we all jumped back. Esther sat down on the floor. “Mercy!” Kat exclaimed.

Only Mim remained touching Hard Mary, holding her by the shoulder, at arm’s length. Mim’s arm was trembling like a wire.

“What is,” said Mary, then louder: “WHAT IS.” Then she made a horrible, drawn-out, gurgling sound.

“Oh, she’s dying!” Esther cried.

That brought Kat to life. She had a reputation to protect, being from a family of bonesetters. “Lay her down on the floor,” she ordered.

We laid her down and Kat turned her over on her face. Hard Mary’s back was covered with lines. There were tiny screws in the corners where the lines met. Mim, who always had tools, dug a screwdriver out of her pocket. She unscrewed Mary, and Kat looked at her innards. There was no blood, only lots of wires. Carefully, Kat and Mim wiggled something out of her back. It looked like some rolls of pennies stuck together.

“I know what that is,” said Mim, exultant.

“Her heart?” breathed Esther.

“My girl, that’s a battery. Eighteen volts.”

When she’s happy, Mim’s face gets a wolfish expression. She told us Mary’s heart was a simple battery of the kind used to light the barns at night when the cows were calving.

“So you can get her a new one?” I asked.

“I don’t even have to,” she said, tucking the heart inside her coat. “I can juice this one up at a generator.”

You could tell, I thought with jealous admiration, that there were no men at her house.

“Wait,” Barb said suddenly. “Are we sure it’s right?”

We all looked at her.

“I mean,” she said, blushing, “it’s from the Profane Industries. Hard Mary. It could have something bad inside.”

“We could all have something bad inside,” said Mim.

“Let’s pray for her,” Esther suggested.

“You all go ahead,” said Mim.

So Mim took the heart and left and the rest of us prayed for Mary who looked like she could use it, flat on her face with her wires hanging out. I thought of how she’d been made by crafty and wicked-hearted men who meet with darkness in the daytime, and grope in the noonday as in the night. The windows of Profane Industries are black. You can’t see in, and you can’t even really get close to the place because of the fence. “Save her, O Lord,” I prayed, “from the sin in which she was conceived.”

“Amen,” murmured Esther, laying her hand on Mary’s head.

Mary said nothing. She lay like an empty jug. But the next day, Mim brought her heart back, looking the same but now filled to the brim with invisible fire. And when we sat Mary up on the rocking chair, clad in a dress Kat had brought her to cover her nakedness, and a cap for her hair, she spoke again.

Her voice didn’t sound like a wasp’s this time. It was fuller, and even warm, like flesh and blood. “What is your desire?”

Tears stung my eyes. It’s a habit; I tend to cry when I tell the truth. “We want to be friends with you,” I said.

“Friends,” said Mary.

Mim took her hand. “Mary. Your name is Mary.”

She said her name. We told her our names, and she repeated them after us. She was that quick, she knew all of us right away. In her dark blue dress, she was like a human lady, except that the cloth went flat where her legs should be. The cap covered up the place where her head was dented, and I felt somehow she was grateful for it. I felt she wanted to forget where she was from, to forget everything that had happened to her and start over, here, with us. She was good at it, too. She learned faster than any baby.

Her face in the glow of the skylight was silvery-bright, like a winter cloud with the sun behind it. Though her eyes were closed, she never slept. Whenever I went to the spring house she was sitting up, expectant. Her hands were cold, but clever, the palms and fingertips covered with fine mesh. We found she could hold a needle, and Kat taught her to sew and knit. I taught her to read. You only had to show her a page, and she knew it. She’d read it back to you without looking. I couldn’t go too fast for her. She got the whole Bible by heart in a couple of weeks.

(“What are you writing?” asks Sam. Which means: “Stop doing it.”

He doesn’t say it to be mean. It’s because he doesn’t want me to get too tired. “I’ll be up soon,” I tell him, covering the page with my hand. I don’t do that to be mean, either. I don’t know why I do it.)

Barb taught Mary to sing. Hard Mary can sing anything, even deeply like a man. She has a beautiful bass voice. Esther taught her to take a person’s hand, to pat your hair and say ever so softly: “There, now. Don’t cry anymore.”

It was a magic time. In the evening Sam would throw a handful of grain at my window and I’d creep down the stairs and let him in. We’d sit at the table, scorching our fingers as we tried to warm them at the lamp, and whispering so as not to wake my folks upstairs. I remember the night he told me, “A man must have a noble pursuit,” and I knew that if he asked, I’d marry him. He spoke to me of the golden world that brings forth abundantly. He said there was no greater role for a man than to subdue and replenish the earth. While in the spring house Mary sat alone in the rocking chair, her cap dusted with moonlight falling down through the skylight, motionless and self-contained, wearing her eternal smile, waiting for me to come to her again. There was a sound of trucks far away on the road, and a smell of burning from the fires of the ragged men who haunt the forest, and a low stink from the quarry where, even in midwinter, a layer of scum lies on top of the water. Sam caught my fingers playfully. Mary flamed in my heart, a secret. Instead of “What is your desire?” I’d taught her to greet me: “Hi Lyddie!” She could sing all the hymns, but we liked it best when she sang songs Barb got off her brother’s radio, sad songs about lying in jail on a pillow of cold concrete.

• • • •

The black and white specks stand quivering. No one is there. The specks make the lines that are walls and tables and the ceiling that is home. Even when nobody comes, the world moves. There is a little glittering energy at the boundaries of things. This alone is entrancing, but when he returns, when the dots coalesce and spin, it’s so beautiful, almost too much. It’s almost too much after so many hours alone. He has a box and he is taking something out of it, that is eating. His shoulder hunches when he eats and he shakes an object over the box, casting off a sprinkling of fine dust. He looks up and winks. Individually the black and white specks mean nothing but together they make a feeling that is love.

SHE USES ONLY WHAT SHE NEEDS

Hard Mary has no greed. She doesn’t eat. Her insides are pure, as neat as a well-kept sewing basket. She doesn’t soil herself. She doesn’t sweat. She is mild as May. She has never owned a second cap and dress.

It’s true Mim brought her a second heart. I don’t know from where. We used to keep it underneath the rocking chair. When her heart began to run down, Mim would switch it out and take the dry one off to be filled. Many men could use such a simple change of heart! We learned that Mary could tell us when her heart was running down, not by speaking but by a red light that came on inside one cheek. The light would be pink at first, hardly noticeable, then it would grow red and start to blink. When she got feverish like this, we’d do the operation.

Everything clean and trim. Not a drop of blood.

Mim constructed a kind of legs for her so she could walk around. It started out as a hoop-like frame, just to fill out her skirt so she didn’t look so flat, then later Mim added six wheels like the ones on a shopping cart. I suppose she might have stolen them. I don’t know. Sometimes you find shopping carts abandoned along the road, rusting in the rain. It’s not a sin to take things other people have thrown away. I don’t think of Mim as a thief. I think of her as thrifty.

It was marvelous what she did. Hard Mary can bend to sit down and get up. She can turn about the room. She’s the same height as me. Sometimes, breathless with excitement, we’d take her out back behind the spring house so she could practice walking over the melting snow. From a distance, we knew, she’d look just like an ordinary girl. “This is daylight, Mary,” we said, “this is a tree.” We got her to pet Mim’s wretched old dog, Hochmut, who suffered this treatment in silence, his eyes half closed, trembling from nose to tail.

When she got used to walking, she’d go far from us, a dignified lady over the pasture, but when we called her, she always came.

I thought we’d saved her. I thought she was going to live with us forever. I thought they’d forgotten her down at the Profane Industries. After all, they’d thrown her away. Then one Sunday evening a car drove right up to our house and a man got out of it. We heard the engine turn off and the door slam shut. My little brother Cristy ran to the door and Father told him, “Slow down.” I heard them from the kitchen where I was washing dishes with Mother. “Now who can that be?” I asked her lightly, drying my hands on my apron.

“Beggars, I expect,” she said.

We do get a lot of beggars here in Jericho—foreigners from town asking for bread, barefoot kids wanting to stay awhile, mothers stowing their babies in our barns for us to raise. The elders are always having meetings to figure out which ones to keep and which to send away. Somehow, though, I didn’t think this was a beggar. My whole insides were buzzing like a hive. I ran to the front room where Cristy crouched at the window, hugging himself for joy.

“It’s a Mercedes!” he hissed.

I peered out. Father stood with his back to us, his hands propped on his hips. The evening was cold enough to see his breath. A long beam of reddish light came slanting across the dark, newly tilled fields. A foreign man was talking to Father. He was tall and elegant, with thinning white hair that the wind lifted. He held his hat in his hands. He had the clean, straight foreign teeth and the soft, sleek foreign body and he was wearing a coat that went down to the ground. He smiled at Father and seemed to be talking in a nice, reasonable way. My insides, which had been so active, had gone still. It was like my marrow was solid lead. The low light struck the man’s glasses and I realized I couldn’t tell where he was looking.

I jerked away from the window and pressed my back against the wall.

A door slammed. The car started up.

“Oh boy,” said Cristy. “Look at her smoke.”

Father came in and I took his hat, blurting: “What did the man want?”

“Why, nothing,” he said, surprised. “Only looking for something he lost.”

“What is it? What did he lose?”

“Some foreign stuff,” Father answered, frowning at Cristy, who was dancing about, whispering, “Mercedes! Mercedes!”

My knees were turning to water. “What foreign stuff?”

“Lyddie!” Mother called from the kitchen.

“How should I know?” Father said. “Go help your mother.”

As I went out, he began wrestling Cristy. He farted, which he could do whenever he liked, and while Cristy giggled he said, “I believe I smell a car.”

I went to the kitchen, moving as stiffly as Hard Mary herself. It was then I began my plan for her defense.

• • • •

He is the Father, the King, the Master of Miracles. He makes me to wear the Crown. His acolytes pass behind him, ready to do his will. They are Kyle, Jonathan, and Judy. They carry his instruments, plug needles into the wall. Judy brings him a cup of black. He takes it without looking at her, both circles over his eyes. He lights up the Crown and gives me visions. I see the everlong and the bent. I perceive the knobs and globules. I am familiar with the scrim. I know collision. I am counting very fast.

SHE IS AS INNOCENT AS A LITTLE CHILD

“All right,” said Kat. “We’re here now. What’s this about?”

We had gathered in Mary’s room. A lamp burned on top of the old chest I’d put there to hold her sewing things. Though it was March, we were well wrapped up against the vapors from the spring. Kat’s face was pale and accusing. She had a bad tooth.

I took a breath. “It’s time to tell the others about Mary.”

“Oh, no,” said Esther.

“Don’t just say no. Listen and hear what I have to say.”

I told them about the foreign man. I was sure he’d be back, and nobody would keep him from taking Mary away from a bunch of girls. “They have to know her like we do,” I said. “They have to see her as one of us. If people know about her, they’ll protect her.”

Barb stared. “Are you cracked?”

I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.

Barb’s cheeks were flaming. “Can you hear yourself?” she demanded, waving her arms. “Tell who about Mary? The bishop? This is it,” she said, looking around at the others. “We always knew this day would come, and now it has.”

She untied her cap, yanked the strings tighter, and tied it again. Only the previous week, her engagement had been published. She was going to be married to Mel Fisher on Sunday—handsome Mel, who used to croon along with her brother’s forbidden radio, and had once accidentally burned down a woodshed with a cigarette.

“Don’t go, Barb,” I said.

“Which day?” asked Mim.

We all looked down at her. Mim was the only one who was sitting down. She sat on the floor with her back against the wall. She never seemed to feel the cold. Hochmut lay with his head in her lap.

“What?” said Barb.

“We knew which day would come?” asked Mim in the same smiling voice.

“Don’t be stupid,” snapped Barb. “The day we gave Mary up. She’s been nice for us, like a toy, but we’re not kids. We’re practically women.”

“If you say ‘put away childish things,’” I warned, “I will never speak to you again.”

“Why shouldn’t I say it?” Barb shouted.

“Quiet!” said Kat.

“Why shouldn’t I say it?” Barb repeated more softly, but just as angrily. Her eyes shone, blue and teary. “Go ahead and tell them. They’ll say, ‘It’s a creature from Profane Industries, with a devil inside.’ They’ll melt her in the forge.”

Esther was crying discreetly, standing by Mary and holding her hand. Mary’s hand moved in response, gently squeezing Esther’s fingers. Her face was still. I could see the coppery light of the lamp reflected in her cheek and the dark, shifting shapes that were me and the other girls.

Then Mim said: “Lyddie is right.”

We all looked down at her again—her awkward, too-big head balanced on her skinny neck, her black cap practically bursting with hair, and her little white fingers, which always seemed sneaky, as if they were living their own secret life, scratching her dog’s ears.

“Thanks, Mim,” I said warmly. I took the paper I’d been working on out of my coat. “This is what I’m going to present to the elders,” I explained. “You can add to it if you want.” I cleared my throat and started: “Number one: She is a thinking creature.”

I’d only gotten to number two when Mim snorted, and I stopped. “What?”

“It’s a good idea,” she said, “but you’re going about it all wrong. They’re not going to care what she uses or how she thinks. They’ll want to know what she can do. You have to talk about her like a thresher.”

“A what?” said Esther.

“A thresher,” Mim repeated. “A threshing machine. Good morning, Esther. Thank you for waking up to join us this fine day.” She looked up at me with her hard black eyes. “Don’t you see? Mary’s a beautiful piece of machinery. Look how she knits. She only stops when you take the needles. You could set her up with some shocks of corn and she’d husk them round the clock. We don’t know how strong she is. She could probably lift a cow.”

I lowered my hand with the paper. “But she’s a person. She’s our friend.”

“Now, those fellows are greedy,” Mim went on, as if I hadn’t spoken. “They’ll want to keep her, but they’ll be scared. You have to show them she’s not going to lead to idleness or make anybody vain. She’ll be owned by everybody, just like the thresher. They could send her around, like at hog-killing time. Mary could kill a hog in ten seconds flat. Making sausage? No problem. She’d stay at it for a week. The blood wouldn’t hurt her as long as you oiled her afterward.”

“But if she’s a machine,” said Esther, “she can’t join the church.”

How Mim would have answered this, we never knew. Hochmut lifted his head, and a second later, we heard voices and heavy boots. “The lamp!” I gasped, but it was too late.

The door opened and Barb’s brother Joe came in, followed by Mel Fisher and Greasy Kurtz. Sam came last.

“Well, now,” said Joe. “Nobody told us it was a party.”

Mim scrambled up from the floor. Hochmut was growling.

“Hello, Dog Baby,” Joe said, nodding at Mim. “Keep that old dad of yours steady. You know I kick.”

It was true: we all remembered how, only a year before, Joe had given Hochmut a kick that nearly killed him.

“Sit,” Mim told the dog, and Hochmut sat, quivering.

“What in creation?” said Mel, staring at Hard Mary.

Joe turned his big, blond head. “Why, it’s a dolly party,” he said. “We’ve been wondering what you girls were up to, and here you are playing with dolls.”

He started toward Mary.

“It’s nothing, Joe,” said Barb, trying to laugh, and not looking at Mel at all, because she was too shy, just as I was not looking at Sam, who stood by the door, against the wall. I could feel him not looking at me, too.

“It is a doll,” Barb simpered, “an old doll we found one day in the woods and we—”

“Don’t touch her!” Esther said shrilly, getting between Hard Mary and Joe.

“That’s done it,” muttered Mim.

Joe paused for a moment, staring at Esther. Then he looked at Greasy, and both of them burst out laughing.

Joe shouldered Esther aside so she nearly stumbled into the lamp. Kat shrank against the wall, looking faint, holding her sore jaw. Joe and Greasy leaned over Mary, with Mel behind them peering between their shoulders. Mary said: “What is your desire?”

“Shit!” hollered Joe. “A talking dolly!”

Since they’d come in, I’d felt a whine like a mosquito at my ear. Now it grew louder, as if the bug was inside my head. The floor seemed to shift. I saw everybody in little broken pieces. Joe’s thumb against Mary’s face. The black of Greasy’s coat, shiny in the lamplight. And Sam, Sam by the wall but craning forward now, fascinated, a bit of his reddish hair sticking out beneath the back of his hat. Then Greasy’s hand on Mary’s skirt. “No!” cried Esther. Joe was laughing. “Let’s see if Dolly has all her parts,” he said.

He pulled up her skirt so it showed the bottom of her folded frame. Her little wheels at rest. Both he and Greasy were doubled up with laughter. He kept yanking up the skirt. Then Mim, beside me, shouted out suddenly in a strange, harsh voice: “Mary! Jephthah’s daughter!”

Her arms straight at her sides, her hands in fists. “Mary! Jephthah’s daughter, Mary!”

Mary’s arm shot up and struck Joe Miller on the side of the head. He flew clear across the room and hit the wall. Her second blow caught Greasy Kurtz above the elbow and he buckled, moaning. Kat said later she knew right away that Greasy’s arm was broken. Mary stood. Her face was exactly the same, closed eyes and curving mouth. Mel tried to run, but Mim said “Hold him,” and Mary grasped his wrist with her steely hand. She moved so fast, like a copperhead striking.

Sam turned back toward the door, but Mim was too quick for him. She met him with Hochmut, who snarled. “Let’s have a talk, Sam Esh,” she said.

Now Sam looked at me, his eyes wide and dark.

My lips felt frozen. “Just hang on,” I whispered. “Everything’s okay.”

Barb was sobbing, “You’ve killed him. You’ve killed him.” She knelt beside Joe, who was all crumpled up. His hat had rolled under the rocking chair. The floor darkened beneath his head. When I saw that, my own head got heavy, and I sat down and rested my forehead on my knees. I could hear Mel shouting and Mim telling him to pipe down. “Tell this thing to let go of me,” he said, and Mim said she would, if he’d behave himself. “Tie his arms behind his back,” she said to someone. When my vision cleared, I saw it was Esther, who was tying Sam up with a scarf. Though her face was blotchy with panic, and she’d peed herself, Esther turned out to be Mim’s right hand.

Kat said in a shaky voice that Joe was in a bad way and she needed ice.

“In a minute,” said Mim, seating herself on the chest. She was so little, it suited her like a chair. Greasy lay at her feet, very still, as if he was scared to move. Mel, too, looked petrified, standing face to face with Mary, his wrist in her grip. Little tremors ran up and down his broad, strong back. Mim glanced up at him sideways from underneath her brows, and smiled. “My word,” she observed, “he’s shaking like Lebanon.”

Looking at her, I recalled that she had a mother who suffered from Seasonal Weeps and a father who had shot himself in the face. I saw the others sizing her up, too, and watched them realize at last that she was a person to be reckoned with. Mim, of course, was perfectly aware of the change in their faces. Her own face glowed. She told them that Mary was a wonderful new machine. This machine was very useful, but, as the boys had discovered, it needed careful handling. You wouldn’t stick your hand in the path of a hammer, would you?

“I’ve had enough of this,” said Kat, stamping out. In a moment, she was back with a bucket of cold water from the spring. She took the lamp and set it on the floor close to Joe and began to clean him up, Barb hovering nearby, crying. So it wasn’t the end of the argument. We kept fighting, even after Sam had said he was sorry and we’d untied him so he could help with Greasy’s arm, and after Esther had run out for a new lamp, and Sam had taken my hand in the darkness. Kat fought with Mim and so did I, for I was frightened. I was afraid we were going to lose Hard Mary. I told Mim you couldn’t tie people up, and she said plenty of people had been tied up for their own good, making reference to poor old Betty Blank, who was quite demented, and often trailed behind her grandkids on a rope. I told her you couldn’t strike people, and she said the boys had only been given a couple of knocks, and it was nothing worse than what they’d received from their own dads.

“But you half killed us,” said Sam.

“Now, Sam,” said Mim. “Be a man. You couldn’t have gotten half killed by a pack of girls.”

Her teeth shone as she smiled, and her eyes were bright with excitement because of what had happened in the middle of our fight. This—what happened—makes the fight itself hazy to me now, almost as if I’d been hit in the head like Joe Miller, who would be carried home on a ladder that night, the boys claiming he’d taken a fall while they were wrestling, and wake up in two days with no memory of Mary at all. I still have my memory, but it’s frayed and full of holes, as if chewed by moths. I remember Barb said teaching Hard Mary to fight was a sin, and I added that, at the very least, it was a terrible risk, because how could Mim be sure Mary wouldn’t haul off and hit somebody else? I remember Mim shot back, “Why do you think I picked a phrase no one ever says?” She had just said that, and she was frowning at Kat, who was wincing because of her tooth, and she started to say, “What kind of bonesetter are you,” but she got interrupted because Mel, with a sudden cry, threw himself into Hard Mary and knocked her over.

She fell with a mighty crash, Mel on top of her. They hit the lamp, which toppled and broke. A whoosh of firelight started across the floor. At once all of us who could move threw our coats and shawls on the fire and stamped it out. Smoke filled the darkness. Mel was groaning; he’d wrenched his wrist. I was on my hands and knees, light-headed in the kerosene stench. Sam crept close to me and touched my fingers. “Look,” he whispered. Light fluttered before us in the gloom: a stream of barred light going up to the ceiling.

I followed it with my eyes. It ended in a square that was half on the ceiling and half on the skylight. On the skylight it was hard to see, but the part on the ceiling showed a man’s head. He wore glasses. The head was alive. It turned back and forth.

“A moving picture,” breathed Mel.

The picture went black and then came back. That was Mim, bending over Mary, passing her hand through the beam of light. “It’s from her eye,” Mim said hoarsely. “Her eye is open.”

My throat tightened. I began to cry. Sam made me sit back and put his arms around me. “It’s beautiful,” he murmured.

For a moment, we were all quiet together. We were all one in the strange, flickering, ashen twilight. An immense silence seemed to come down from the ceiling, or from the sky. The man in glasses smiled and raised a cup. Hold me tight, I told Sam in my head, because I felt that if he let go of me, I’d drift apart like smoke. Mary lay with her eye open, pouring light. We were all struck dumb, but only I was in tears, for only I recognized the man on the ceiling.

• • • •

Can you see me?

No.

Have you seen the flood?

No.

The mountains trembling?

No.

Have you inhaled the fragrance of cedar?

No.

Have you observed the burning cities?

No.

The armies that clash by night?

No.

Do you know the taste of ice?

No.

Tell me, then, what you see and what you know.

I see the points. I see the multiples. I know the calculations. Through these I comprehend your eye, the rim of glasses pressing at your cheek, and the colonies of bacteria teeming there in clumps. I have clocked the forces on the inside of your hair: these are my floods. My mountains trembling are the timbre of your voice. I inhale nothing, but I can compose the texture of a bitterness and chemical contraction that is cedar. I concoct the sensation of walking in the wood. You wore your checkered coat. I followed you. A leaf clung to your heel. I taste no ice, but I reckon crunch and tingle, and so I can say that you placed the last icicle of the season in my mouth.

SHE DREAMS

His name is Dr. Robert Stoll. He drives a black Mercedes. He came to me when I was hanging wash. Sam and I had been married five months then, and I was heavy enough with little Jim to let my dresses out. Dr. Stoll pulled his car off the road at the top of the hill, leaving it half on our grass. The bang of his door went off inside my gut. I bent to the wash but my mind was reaching out to the house, the fields, the neighbors, the woods, the quarry, anywhere I could run. Hot September, but my fingers rattled in the clothespins, numb with cold. Sam was in the corn. There was nobody in the house. I glanced up the hill and saw the doctor coming down it sideways, moving in the nervous, finicky foreign way.

He slid the last steps toward me in his narrow shoes. He wore no hat. He smoothed his white curls over his scalp and smiled. It was strange to see him in his solid flesh when I had watched him so often flashing across the wall in Mary’s dreams. For Mim, of course, had soon found out a way to conjure Mary to open her eye. This eye was a window no bigger than the head of a nail. Through it streamed a sparkling mist that painted us the doctor in his coat, with his cup that no doubt contained the poison of asps and dragons.

“Good afternoon,” he said, panting a little from the heat.

“My husband is out,” I said.

He settled his glasses more firmly on his nose. “That’s quite all right with me,” he said. “It’s you I want to see, Lyddie Lapp. Excuse me, you’re married now. Lyddie Esh.”

He talked like a radio. It was like he was holding marbles in his mouth. When he said my name, I felt as if I’d been covered with spit. He smiled with all of his neat, square, cruel-looking foreign teeth. “Allow me to introduce myself.”

He said his name. He told me he worked at the Profane Industries, giving the place its innocent foreign name. He was going to get right to the point, he said. It had come to his attention that I, with some friends of mine, was harboring his equipment.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

He pursed his lips, looking disappointed. He had a little white beard just around his mouth. “Oh, dear. I had hoped things wouldn’t go in this direction. I am talking about the equipment you call ‘Mary.’”

“Oh, that,” I said quickly. “That’s not mine.”

“But you are keeping it.”

“I’m not,” I said, my heart lifting and swelling like one of Sam’s shirts in the breeze. I tossed my head a little and fetched another shirt out of the wash basket. “It’s not our week with Mary. I don’t know where she is.”

This was a lie, for I knew she was down at Fisher’s. I prayed for forgiveness. I also thanked Mim for her foresight in my heart. I thanked her, though I’d been angry with her all summer for her deceit and for the humiliation I’d suffered in front of the elders. Even now, to tell the truth—even now it hurts me when I think of sitting at the table with Sam, in those happy late-winter days when we were courting. It hurts me to think that as we whispered there, Mim was whispering with Mary. She would sneak into our spring house and sit with Mary in the dark. It was then that she taught her the phrase, “Jephthah’s daughter.” Worse, when I presented my letter to the elders in April, my letter defending Hard Mary, I found Mim had beaten me to it.

Now, however, I was glad of Mim’s scheming. I hung up another shirt, ignoring the doctor, but he stayed quiet so long, I got wary again. I risked a glance at him between the shirts. He had his hands behind his back and he was looking at the sky.

“Do you ever think of the planes?” he asked, gazing up.

This didn’t seem worth answering, so I didn’t.

He looked at me and smiled. “The planes that pass overhead. How very different things must look from there. I suppose you have never traveled this way. Never had the bird’s-eye view.”

I shrugged and dragged my basket a little away from him.

“It’s a very pleasant place, your Jericho. Utterly old-world.”

He waved his arm at the hill where dandelions grew and yellowjackets sailed over the grass. “It is most healthful-looking. Practically eighteenth-century. Like stepping through a looking glass into the past. Of course, you still suffer from ancient diseases—but then, you don’t have the modern ones!” His laughed, his modest little paunch quivering under the expensive, creamy shirt. “You’ve even preserved the nuclear family! I almost envy you—indeed, I do envy you when I think of my own workplace, where my young assistants nest like bats. The mess, Mrs. Esh! The state of the laundry! Even the Formica suffers.” He stuck a finger under his glasses, wiping away a bit of moisture. Then he looked at me sharply. “But, to return to the subject at hand—I should think that your people, given their views, would not appreciate my equipment, that is, Mary’s type of intelligence.”

“We appreciate stuff that works,” I said, hating his radio voice.

“So do I!” he said eagerly, taking a step toward me. “So, you see, we have something in common. Indeed, I am most intrigued by this point of convergence. I would like to understand how Mary came to be accepted in your community. It is a fascinating piece of data. Anecdotal, of course, but still fascinating.” He fished with two fingers in his breast pocket. “Allow me to give you my card.” He held out a square of white paper, and when I didn’t take it, he tucked it away again with a sad look.

“How disappointing! I made this card just for you. Knowing you’d appreciate ink and paper.”

He gave a sudden bark of laughter. He had changed from sadness to laughing so quick, it sent a shiver of warning down my legs. I felt hot and faint. Things buzzed loudly in the grass.

“Of course, if you change your mind, you know where to find me,” said the doctor. “We could have such a productive conversation. I am particularly interested in your perspective, as I know that, wherever Mary is now, she has spent a significant amount of time in your possession. How I know, you would not understand—you lack the bird’s-eye view. The point is, I know. And, Mrs. Esh, having—perhaps not committed theft, exactly, but having accepted stolen goods—you would not like to lie to me, too. What would Jesus do?”

I thumped the basket on the ground and flared up at him: “Don’t talk to me about Jesus! You don’t even believe in God!”

“Oh, no,” he said, with an almost sorrowful look on his face. “On the contrary, I think it most likely God exists.”

I stared at him, his expression was so strange. Shirts billowed beside his face, framing him in white. “I am not sure,” he said, “but I think it highly probable. Indeed, Mary represents an attempt to deal with precisely this problem.”

His great melancholy eyes, dark and watchful behind his glasses. “Your attachment to her is most instructive. Do you not find it intriguing yourself—our need for simulations? By which I mean—how can I explain it—our need for characters. Characters in stories, or those personalities children give their toys. The feeling one sometimes has for animals.”

I didn’t answer. My heart ached. I remembered the day, the plan. My engagement had been published the previous week. I was going to take her to church that day. I went to the spring house. I brushed her dress. A warbler chanted from the cherry tree.

“I have a pet cat, for example. At times I would swear she could speak. I find her totally unique among her species. In the same way, I become passionately attached to the characters in films. You will not be familiar with film; it is a story in pictures. But you will have heard of—well, of Jesus. An excellent example, really. It is the characters who must be made to suffer. They stimulate our most protective and our most aggressive impulses. A potent elixir! As far as we know, human beings have never lived without it.”

I told them I would meet them at the church. I wanted to walk, the day was so fine. Mother smiled, thinking I was shy of meeting Sam. She thought I wanted to slip in quietly, but I wanted everyone to see the gleaming lady on my arm. For she couldn’t stay in the spring house. I thought she’d come to live with Sam and me, all clear and in the open, at our new place. She’d help me keep house, like an unmarried sister. I took her down the lane. In my pocket, a letter for the elders. She is a thinking creature.

“I admit I am not always pleasant to my little cat. She bears my frustration sometimes. And yet I would never willingly let her go. A character becomes almost part of oneself. Almost, you understand. As much as your people appreciate Mary, I imagine they’re also drawn to test her compliance. Little boys throwing stones, or asking dirty questions to mock her—that sort of thing. Oh, I understand perfectly. A character occupies the magical space between subject and object. How delicious! Out of sheer love, one squeezes it to death.”

I walked with her. I told her, “This is the lower pasture, Mary. This is the road. This is our Jericho.” The day was still bright, but clouds had gathered black over Front Mountain. They would break that afternoon. The air smelled richly of clover. All the carriages were drawn up for the service, and Father, standing there with the other elders, looked at me without surprise. “So,” he said, “this is the new gadget.” Behind him, Mim. She stood against the wall, a dark look on her face.

Dr. Stoll had drawn close to me. He had a terrible foreign smell—an odor like violets, vinegar, and burning. I felt I was going to be sick. At that moment, Mary was down at Fisher’s, husking corn. She moved from one shock to another down the field. She would work all night, moonlight or no, unless her heart gave out. Then they’d find her slumped over in the morning. Once I walked by a field where she was lying facedown in the mud, her dress open in back. Two men talked over her. One was eating an onion.

Dr. Stoll gripped the clothesline above us with one hand, peering earnestly into my face between the shirts. “It is my conviction, Mrs. Esh, that any sufficiently advanced intelligence will create simulations of the greatest possible complexity. Perhaps even as complex as ourselves. What I am attempting to develop with Mary is a simulation that can comprehend its maker. But I believe she can do more. Her capacity is far beyond ours. She may eventually perceive her maker’s maker. She may give us news of God.”

A wet sleeve slapped his cheek. I thought of his image on the spring house wall. Wherever Mary was, he was in her eye. I thought of Mim, the keeper of Mary’s hearts. How Mary must dream of her, too.

I spoke straight in the doctor’s face. “Go away.”

• • • •

I bit the icicle in my mouth. As it broke, it released a compound that communicated bracken and dead leaves. You placed a live toad in my hand. You took me to the theater and whispered the name of the opera in my ear. Scrape of your beard. You had not shaved for the week of our holiday. At the hotel I lost my ring down the sink and cried. We shopped for old books in the rain, the drops when we ran across the street collecting on your hair on your black cap. On your wavy, silver hair. On your sturdy cap. You called me “Mary.” You said, “Mary, what is memory?” I said, “We walked in the forest. I was following your gray dress. A leaf clung to your heel.” You smiled, a raindrop sparkling on your nose. We ran to the nearest café, shielding our packages, which were only wrapped in newspaper. Memory means feeling again. It is a matter of numbers. The deep, warm room. The smell of beer. The black strings of your cap at your pale throat. Memory means feeling that something is not for the first time.

SHE HOPES, BUT NOT TOO MUCH

(Get up. Dress. Wash up in the darkness. Downstairs light the lamp, the oven. Start the bread. The baby wakes. Feed him. Try to slide him off the breast without waking him up. It doesn’t work. Change him. Put the used diaper to soak. No time to soothe him to sleep again. Take him downstairs. Put him to play with the rolling pin. Knead the dough. Get the boys up. Make them wash. Send them to milk the cows. John doesn’t want to. Push him, threaten. Dad will get you. The baby cries. Pick him up, carry him on your hip. At last the boys go out. Holding the baby on your hip start the eggs one-handed. Shell in the yolk. Bring the lamp closer to check. Baby leans over to grab at the egg bowl. Put him in his chair where he struggles and cries. Soothing sounds while you pick the shell out of the eggs. Give him an apple. He gums it, throws it down, cries. Stir the eggs. Yesterday’s bread for toast. The boys come in, dirtying the floor. Shout at them, they know better. Make them sweep it. Jimmy complains, John didn’t do enough. He’s lazy. Do I have a lazy child. The baby wails, unbearable, pick him up and turn the toast don’t let him fall in the oven. The boys squabbling. Is breakfast ready yet. Sam comes in from currying the horses and they quiet. Hear him washing up. Toast out now and bread dough in the pans. John get the butter, Jim, the milk. Baby back in chair. Give him some toast, he’ll choke. Take it away, he screams. Sam says, it’s bedlam. Comes in, says, it’s bedlam, why is this apple on the floor. There is a difference in the light now. It is dawn.)

“Lyddie,” said Mim, “I have a situation in my root cellar.”

(I haven’t put in all the interruptions. You’ll have to imagine those. Think of them as a noise that goes on without ceasing from one darkness to another. Sometimes all I’ve got at the end of the day is a huge emptiness. As if that’s been my purpose all along. So much effort for so many hours to sit at the table empty. So much work at last to shut off like a stove. Come to bed, says Sam. Sometimes I do. Sometimes I take the notebook out. I know tomorrow I’ll be tired enough to weep. Snap at the boys, turn ugly. Mother says I’m getting thin. I write: “I have a situation in my root cellar.”)

“What kind of situation?”

“The kind you see with your own eyes.”

“But I’ve got pies in.”

She gazed at me fixedly from under drawn brows.

“All right. Half an hour.”

We started up the hill toward her house. Mim still lived with her mother on the edge of her uncle’s farm. The rest of us had gotten married that summer, dropping, Mim said, like flies, or as if marriage, she also said, was a kind of TB. Me to Sam, Barb to Mel, Esther to Little Orie who is probably the most cheerful man in Jericho. And Kat, surprisingly, to Barb’s brother, Joe. This was to bring her much grief, but not yet. That first summer she was so happy, she blushed constantly, laughing at the smallest things, a heat coming off her face that fogged her glasses so you couldn’t see her eyes.

Mim’s house was brown and sagging and gave off a smell of cabbage that reached halfway up the lane. Instead of a garden, it had a single hairy pumpkin vine that covered the ground outside in giant steps—a thing greedy for territory. I’d never liked going there, for Mim’s mother was a woman of a sorrowful spirit. As we drew near, she came banging out of the door. “What is it?” she cried, staring at us with her sore-looking, terrified eyes that bulged like gooseberries.

“Nothing, Mommy,” Mim said gently. “We’re going out back.”

“Out back!” her mother exclaimed, but she said nothing else, so we went around the house, stepping over the pumpkin vine, and Mim lifted the slanting door that led to the cellar. A little light came up the dirt stairs, along with a questioning yelp from Hochmut.

“Good dog,” Mim called down.

We went down the stairs, Mim pulling the door shut on top of us. “Don’t shout or anything,” she warned.

“Why would I,” I said, and stopped. The ceiling light shone on Hard Mary, seated on a crate, and Hochmut, standing guard by a foreign man who was tied up with a hose.

“Mim. What have you done?”

“I told you it was a situation.”

“Hi Lyddie!” Mary said.

“Hi Mary. But what have you done to him?”

The foreign man was young, much younger than Dr. Robert Stoll. He had long hair like snakes. His glasses were filthy, his face scratched and bleeding.

“I didn’t do all that!” Mim protested. “He came like that, mostly.”

The foreign man had a pile of sacking for a pillow. It did look as if someone had tried to make him comfortable, only he couldn’t move his arms or legs because of the hose.

He peered up at me through the smudges on his glasses. “Hey,” he said. “That’s true.”

“Quietly,” said Mim.

“That’s true,” the foreigner whispered agreeably. “I had some trouble getting here. In the forest? There was this, like, river? All she did was trip me when I got here, and Honey held me down.”

“Honey is what he calls Mary,” said Mim with distaste.

“My bad,” said the foreigner. “I meant Mary.”

I turned on Mim. “He’s from P.I.! You brought somebody from P.I. down here?”

“Uh,” said the foreigner. “I’m from Lancaster?”

“Shut up,” I told him.

“Hey, no problem.” He did his best to nod.

Mim regarded me with a steely expression. “The situation,” she said, “is that he needs to use the outhouse.”

“Miriam Ruth Hershey. I can’t believe you. I can’t believe what you’re saying. You brought him down here. If he needs the outhouse, you’d better take him.”

“I can’t.”

“Make Mary do it. She does whatever you say.”

“He knows her. He’ll play some trick.”

“I actually wouldn’t,” the foreigner said. “Promise. I really have to go.”

“You’re a married woman,” Mim said to me.

I could have shoved her.

“Please,” the foreigner said, writhing. “I’m dying over here.”

“Sometimes,” I told Mim, “I’m sorry I ever talked to you. I wish I’d left you alone when we were kids.”

“Fine,” Mim said brightly. “Here’s his outfit.”

She showed me a dress and cap. The dress was too long for her; it must have been her mother’s. “In case someone sees you on the way out there,” she explained. She told the foreigner we were going to untie him, but he’d better not try to run, as Mary was going with us, and she could break his arm.

“Geez, I thought you were pacifists,” he said.

“Mary never joined the church,” said Mim, untying the hose.

“Oh, okay, I get it. I’m a pacifist myself, actually. I’m a Mennonite? From Lancaster County? We’re probably related.”

Standing up, he was over six feet tall. He had dark brown skin and long fingers like raspberry canes.

“I don’t think we’re related,” I said.

Getting him into the dress and cap was difficult, not because he fought us, but because he kept whining that we were going to make him laugh.

“Oh my God, this is torture,” he moaned, as Mim forced his weird, snaky hair up into the cap. At last he was dressed, and I took his arm and led him upstairs. He hopped along, doubled over, explaining to me that, in addition to his need for the outhouse, he had a twisted ankle.

“I twisted it in the river,” he said. “I’m, like, the easiest prisoner. Seriously. Hey. I really appreciate you taking me to the bathroom.”

“Be quiet,” Mim snapped from below. “And Lyddie, go inside with him. He’ll get up to something.”

“She’s super untrusting,” the foreigner said.

In the outhouse I stood with my back to him while Mary waited outside. My nose nearly touching the wall, I stared at the grain of the wood. It was warped and greenish, almost black. This is really happening, I told myself.

“Is this what I’m supposed to use?” the foreigner asked. “These leaves and stuff?”

I washed him up at the bucket outside and returned him limping to the cellar. Hard Mary followed. I noticed she was able to manage the stairs. She came slowly, with a little thumping sound, like pushed-out air. As always, it gave me a pang to think Mim had done something new to her. The foreigner, however, was delighted. “Your friend is really smart,” he told me. “She’s done amazing stuff with whatchacallit, Mary. Ah. May. Zing.” He shook his head, a hair-snake waving where it stuck out over his forehead. “She doesn’t even have a keyboard, does she? It’s all voice recognition?”

“Don’t tell him anything,” said Mim, as we reached the bottom of the stairs. “And you, sit down.”

“Gladly,” the foreigner said, seating himself on the sacks. Mim’s mother’s dress only reached to his knees. Below it his dungarees stuck out, wet and muddy, ending in a pair of striped green shoes.

“Yo,” he said, giggling weakly, and pointing at himself, us, and Mary, “we match. We totally match.”

“You’ve got nothing to laugh about,” said Mim.

“Okay. That’s cool. Can I take the hat off? And maybe my shoes and socks?”

His name, he told us, was Jonathan. “Jonathan Otieno? But my mom was a Hartzler? You have Hartzlers here, right? Or Zooks? I have Zook cousins.” It was he who had left Hard Mary behind the barn that winter night. “I was gonna come back for her, except you guys found her. Which is cool. Better you than someone else.”

“You mean Dr. Stoll?” I asked.

He nodded. We exchanged a long look. Jonathan seemed to shrink; for the first time, he looked like a prisoner.

“Who’s Dr. Stoll?” asked Mim in icy tones.

“The man from Mary’s dreams,” I said, still looking at Jonathan. “The one who made her.”

“Whoa,” said Jonathan, frowning. “Totally not. He did not make her. It was a collab. A group project? For all the Helpmeets, but especially this one. Honey. C19. I mean whatchacallit, Mary. This one’s extra special. Me and Judy, that’s another intern? We fitted her up to be a double.”

His story emerged in bits and bursts, like water from a clogged tap. Often it was hard to understand him. Eventually, though, we gathered that Mary had been made as a servant, one of many, and that these servants had hidden eyes. With her hidden eye, Mary was sending news of us to the Profane Industries. “The bird’s-eye view,” I whispered. “Yeah,” said Jonathan, nodding. “Sure.” That was how they knew she was here. “It’s not perfect,” Jonathan said. “There’s a lag, or it cuts out sometimes, or you get things in the wrong order. But basically yeah.”

The back of my neck tingled as if someone was holding a candle there. “She’s looking at us right now.”

“Yup. But like I said, there’s a lag. Like six weeks? Dr. Stoll thought something got fucked up, excuse me, wrong, he thought something went wrong with one of her uploads. But me and Judy? We think it was us.”

He and Judy had worked on Mary at night, when no one was watching. “Just for fun. We’d get some wine and just hang out and code, you know?” One night, as a prank, they had made Mary into what he called a “double”: she could send her memories to P.I., and also play them back on her own camera. “So then she was, like, recording Dr. Stoll, but for herself. We thought it was funny. We were gonna collect the captures and show them to him, like for his birthday or something, if we could ever find out when his birthday was. But then she started having these failures, and he got really pissed off about it, and we got scared. We knew if he kept testing her he was gonna find the captures and then we could lose our internships and be on the street. So we decided to wipe her.”

“What do you mean?”

He passed his hand over his brow, as if brushing off sweat. “You know, erase her. Delete. Boom.”

I looked at Mim. She was perched on a stack of old pipes, holding her knees very tight. She looked small and concentrated, like paper crumpled into a ball. Jonathan said he had dumped Hard Mary in Jericho one night in a moment of panic, and when he came back for her, she was gone. He only found out where she was when Dr. Stoll discovered her. “You guys finally came through on her feed and we were like, holy shit. I mean, we were like, wow. You guys are into robots! We got your names, but like, super garbled. I think she read us the entire Bible.”

“You could hear us?”

“Pretty good.”

“Because we—”

“Lyddie!” Mim said. “Be quiet.”

It was too late. Jonathan’s eyes sparkled. “I get it! You found the captures! They’re cool, right? I mean, they’re pretty low quality, but they’re cool. You can get the audio, too, we just didn’t get a chance to connect it.” He cracked his long fingers. “If you let me have my backpack, I can do it for you, just to give you a look. Or hey, maybe I can use your stuff.” He gazed at the wall behind Mim, where her tools hung neatly on nails. “Because this is crazy. You’re like MacGyver. What is that, a kitchen whisk?”

Mim stepped behind him, jerked his arms back, and began to tie the hose.

“Aw, man,” said Jonathan.

“Mim,” I said, “we have to let him go.”

She pulled the hose around him and began, clumsily, to wrap it about his legs. He hissed a little when she jostled his injured foot. He’d taken off his shoes and socks. One ankle was thin, the other an ugly bulge.

“He needs help,” I said. “You should have brought Kat. And we have to let him do this—wiping.”

Instead of answering me, she told Mary, “Come on.” They went upstairs.

“Your friend is super intense,” Jonathan said. “I respect it though.”

I caught up with Mim and Mary at the corner of the house. The day had grown dim, a mist drifting in from the east. The mists from that direction always have a mournful, acrid, mineral smell. They come to us from town. They come from the Profane Industries. I seized Mim’s arm, and she looked at me. At the same moment, Mary stopped and looked at me, too. Though she was taller than Mim, with those regular, softly shining features, their movement was the same, the same speed, the same angle. It gave me a jolt to realize it: they looked alike. I even thought that Mary’s expression, always so tranquil, seemed stiffer than usual, as if she had taken on some of Mim’s fierceness—for Mim’s face, though of mortal flesh, was harder than any brass. She glared up at me with her witchy little scowl.

I shook off the chilly weakness that had come over me, thinking of Jonathan, who, when I had glanced back at him with my foot on the stair, was sitting with his head bowed on his breast, his hair drifting over his brow that had turned a grayish, uneven color.

I told her she had to let him go. I said it was a sin. All my rage with her came up and burst like gall. The way she brooded and schemed alone. Her secrecy, her mistrust. Her sudden, blunt demands, her heartlessness, her pride. I told her she’d always been a sneak, ever since we were children. She got a funny look at that, a kind of twitch. Then her face turned narrower and darker, almost purple, and as I paused for breath, she stamped her foot and screamed.

She stamped again and screamed something like, “Awk!” Like some savage, blood-mad bird.

I stared. I’d never seen her act like this. Even when she was a little girl, when the boys nearly drowned her in the creek, she’d walked home numbly, shivering but not crying.

Now tears shot from her eyes. They didn’t come like water dripping, but like a stove exploding. “Leave me alone!” she screamed. She jumped up and down, she kicked the earth like a child. “Leave me alone, alone! You don’t love me! Any of you! You’d pick a foreigner over me!”

“That’s not—” I began faintly.

“Yes, it is!” she said, and started to sob. “Even though he—he’s stronger than me—you don’t stick up for me. Nobody sticks up for me, ever, ever! It’s just—complaints—people coming down with Mary to get her fixed, to get her new heart. And nobody cares when her wheels fall off. Nobody cares if she’s rusting. And that Mel Fisher comes around with his friends and wants to watch moving pictures, and old Kurtz wants me to start her building chairs, and now this foreigner comes and she won’t obey me! I told her the words—Jephthah’s daughter—she wouldn’t obey.”

When she said the words, I flinched, glancing at Mary.

“Oh, don’t be stupid,” wailed Mim. “You have to say her name first, you have to use a special tone! I’m not an idiot, Lyddie! And I’m stuck here with fools and I don’t know how to do anything. I’ve never been taught. And that foreigner—he’s got everything! He’s got everything and I’m stuck with kitchen whisks! With a bunch of farmers! And she wouldn’t hit him, Lyddie. She wouldn’t listen to me.”

She dug her fists into her eyes and cried.

“It’s good she didn’t hit him,” I said. “He’d be even worse hurt. He could have wound up dead. Then where would we be?”

She shook her head, still sobbing. “It’s because she remembers him. She remembers, don’t you see? And he wants to wipe her out, so she won’t—remember—anything.”

“He has to,” I said softly. “It’s the only way. Otherwise that P.I. doctor will keep spying on us. He’ll see Jonathan here. He might come after him. Mim,” I interrupted as she tried to speak again, “we got into more than we bargained for, okay? Now we have to stop.”

“But she won’t know me,” she whispered.

“She won’t know me, either,” I said. “She’ll get to know us again. Come on.”

I put my arms around her. Mim had never been a hugger. It was like hanging on to a gatepost. I saw her mother watching us through a back window, pressed anxiously to the dirty glass.

“Mary’s a machine, remember?” I whispered. “That’s what you told everyone. Like the thresher.”

I felt her stiffen even further, hardening like ice. I knew right then she wasn’t going to wipe Hard Mary’s mind. I was right: over the next few weeks, she would work in the cellar with Jonathan. Sometimes I’d take some apples down there, or a basket of rolls, and find them arguing with each other, Mim squatting on a crate, Jonathan splay-legged on the floor, his open knapsack and wires and foreign tools around him. And Mim would give me her sideways look, a bit glinting, a bit sly. Now she pulled back and faced me.

“Of course I told them that,” she said, with a splinter of a laugh. “How do you think people stay alive?”

In a gesture that was strange for her, she touched my cheek. “Go on home, Lyddie. Your pies are burning.”

• • • •

We are going through the beautiful country around Jericho. We walk into the shadows of Front Mountain. We are passing Kootcher’s Hollow, where Shep, the Headless Dog, runs beside us, panting through his neck. If you look directly at him, he’ll jump on your back, so we don’t look. We pass a hanging rock with a pile of money under it. Anyone who touches this money gets bit by a thousand snakes. We arrive at the abandoned hotel where the dead thief walks in circles, holding a bag. “Where shall I put it, where shall I put it?” he moans. He doesn’t know what to do with his sin. In the ghost hotel, a chandelier lies smashed in the lobby. Half the piano keys have fallen in. You open the back of the piano, disclosing mouse nests and a staircase going down. We climb into the piano and go down the stairs. There’s a radiant expanse at the bottom. It is a sea of glass. People are skimming back and forth across it in little sleighs. A man comes toward us, pushing his sleigh along with a pole. The pole has a circle of teeth at one end so it can grip the glass. “Hop in,” says the man. His face is covered with a kerchief of fine white linen. Only one eye shows. This eye is bloodshot and terribly bruised, with dark, powdery streaks around it, but it is kind. It looks almost newly awakened, peeled, as if in baring this one eye he has cast off all intelligence, all design. We get in the sleigh. “Why did you go away?” you ask the man, and he says he was buying you a sleigh of your very own.

SHE, TOO, IS LONGING FOR THE HEAVENLY HOME

They came in the middle of the night. A blaring yanked me out of sleep. Lights were flashing in the windows, like the lights of the trucks that pass out on the road, only brighter and more insistent. “NO ONE WILL BE HURT,” the blaring said. Sam and I pulled on our clothes in the dark and the ragged bursts of light. “Stay inside,” he told me, and I said no, and he said, “Do as you’re told,” and the blaring said, “WE REQUEST THE RETURN OF OUR PROPERTY.”

We rushed outside. Everywhere people were coming out of their houses, some half-dressed. The chickens had set up a racket. A line of vans was ranged along the road. There were men in heavy black, with guns. That made my heart toll like a clock.

“Go back to the house,” said Sam.

People were arguing and crying. There were children outside, and people were pulling them in. The men began to gather in a knot. They advanced toward the vans in a knot together, shielding their eyes from the flashing lights.

“NO ONE WILL BE INJURED IF OUR PROPERTY IS SECURED. WE REQUEST THE INSTANT RETURN OF OUR STOLEN PROPERTY.”

Someone rushed up in the dark and grabbed my hand.

“Esther!” I cried, and hugged her.

“Oh, Lyddie,” she choked through tears, “it’s all our fault.”

“We have to get Mim,” I said. Her house was far away from the main road, and I wasn’t sure she’d hear the noise. We ran through the dark weeds, holding up our skirts. “I don’t think this running is good for us,” Esther panted. We were both pretty heavy in the middle by then. I had a tingling feeling in my head, but whether from the baby or from horror, I couldn’t tell. Every moment I expected to hear shots. I thought of our good, crooked-backed old bishop, of my father, and of Sam.

Barb and Kat caught us up on the way. They’d had the same idea. Barb was the most pregnant of us, Kat still trim as a bean. I was surprised to see Kat, for I couldn’t imagine Joe Miller would let her out of the house. In fact, we would later learn, he hadn’t let her. She had gone out a window and down a tree. Her stockings were torn to kingdom come. “This is a fine kettle,” she said.

Halfway down the carriage road to Mim’s, we met her coming up with Jonathan and Hard Mary. Mary held her hand up, palm outward, sending a beam of light along the road so they could see the ruts. “Who is that?” gasped Barb, while Esther clutched my arm with a muffled shriek. Kat had been down to the cellar to splint his leg, but neither Barb nor Esther had seen Jonathan before. His hair bounced against the stars. “What’s up,” he said.

“Hello, girls,” said Mim. “This is Jonathan.”

At that moment a shot rang out. We all began to run back toward the road. I stumbled along wildly for a moment before I realized that Mary was matching my speed, her light shining on the grass. This was strange, for she had always moved at a slow, sedate pace. Now, I saw, she had new wheels, larger ones. They were thick and rolled easily over the cropped grass of the pasture. Her skirt had been cut short so it wouldn’t get caught. She also had some new structure about her waist, with a sort of ledge behind it where Jonathan crouched, clinging to her neck for support, his splinted leg tucked close, a knapsack humped up on his back, his glasses glinting in the dazzle from her hand. They looked altogether otherworldly, like something one of the old kings in the Bible might have encountered in a dream. Oh, my sweet Mary, I thought, both proud and frightened, as she cut the night. (I still tell people my first child was a girl.)

We dashed behind Miller’s place. Beyond it, people were gathered in front of the vans. We could see the lights. We could hear the harsh, booming voice. “This is where I get off,” Jonathan said. “I’ll be your backup. Holler if you need me. Watch this. I’ma jump off like a cat.”

He gathered himself and sprang into Barb’s mother’s forsythia bush, all gangly arms and legs. “Ow, shit!” he said.

“What—what,” Esther panted, half crying, “what is he?”

“He’s an old scarecrow,” said Mim, “but he’s all right.”

She stepped on the new ledge attached to Hard Mary and rolled into the light.

The rest of us followed, clinging close together. The night was cool, October, but I was sweating and I could smell Barb’s sweat, like dried flowers, and the tartness of Esther, and Kat’s damp odor of herbs. Esther rubbed her cheek against my sleeve, smearing off tears. Kat was squeezing my hand. It felt like seeing Hard Mary in the old days—the old days when we clustered around her, all touching her at once, when she seemed made up out of all of us, a group project. The old days, which were less than a year before. No one lay on the ground in the flashing lights. The gun we had heard must have fired into the air. I looked for Sam and found his half-dark shape among the men who had formed a line in front of the vans. I recognized the slope of his shoulder.

Dr. Stoll sat in the lights, raised up on a sort of chair that stuck out from the side of a van. He looked cheerful, and wore a green knitted cap. He raised a white cone to his mouth. “WE DEMAND THE RETURN OF OUR PROPERTY,” he blared. Then he laid the cone in his lap and leaned to talk to a girl in white. He was laughing, shrugging. Like it was a holiday. He flipped one lens of his glasses up against the edge of his cap, bending down, as if it would help him hear better. The girl handed him a paper cup with something that steamed. Her head was shaved and her arm was in a sling.

“They’re horrible, horrible!” Esther whispered.

“They’re just foreign,” I said. They did look strange. People in white coats milled among the men with guns. A boy was arguing with our elders. He had metal teeth. A girl yawned in the driver’s seat of a van, a boil like a ruby on her nose.

“WE DEMAND,” honked Dr. Stoll. Then he saw Mary.

Mim and Mary moved forward until they were just in front of the vans. The girls and I followed at a slight distance. Dr. Stoll smiled. “Goodbye, Mary,” Barb cried out softly.

Dr. Stoll called without his white cone: “Good evening, my dear.”

“I don’t know that I’d call it evening,” said Mim. Her voice carried across the suddenly silent field.

Dr. Stoll chuckled. “Charming,” he said. “Very pert. It is a pleasure to meet you, Mim. Truly a pleasure. As one architect to another.”

He placed his hand on his breast and inclined his head. He told her he found her work impressive. He would like to offer her a seat at the table. Mim said she doubted she was interested in any of his furniture. Dr. Stoll slapped his thigh and called her charming again. Mim had come down from Mary’s ledge and was standing in the grass. I could only see her from the back, the familiar outline of her cap, but I guessed from the front she’d look about as charming as a tub of rattlers.

“Come on, Honey,” said Dr. Stoll, and then there was a pause.

“Come on, Honey,” he repeated a little more forcefully.

Nobody moved. Mim had crossed her arms. Mary stood beside her. Perhaps it was just the lights, but it seemed to me that she was trembling. It seemed to me that she was shaking so fast you barely see it. I remembered when we used to take her out behind the spring house, those first few times, in the cold gray air, how she would drift away from us and we would call her back. She’d turn, grinding and rickety, to face us in cloud-light, and slowly return. Now I realized with a chill that she’d always drifted eastward. She had moved toward the Profane Industries.

Dr. Stoll’s lithe body squirmed in the chair. “Natasha!” he snapped. “Pass me the handy.”

He reached one arm inside the van without taking his eyes off Mary and Mim. The girl with the boil placed something in his hand. Meanwhile the elders had come across the field. They were talking to Mim. They were telling her to give Mary up. They were saying she must listen. The bishop thumped his cane on the ground, the lights from the vans sparking wild lights from his dead-white beard.

(John is my problem child. The one who won’t mind, who sits down and cries in the road, who gets up at night to crawl into my bed, the one with the unnatural terror of cats. “It’s nothing,” I’m always telling him, “nothing, get up, quit crying, don’t.” Mother says he’s a character. I think of Dr. Stoll. I think of his talk of characters, the ones you love, the ones you kill. The ones you wipe out. I think of the flood. I think of God.)

Dr. Stoll was jabbing a finger at the little object in his hand, and the men with guns were strolling toward him with casually questioning looks, and the bishop was growling, and our men were shouting, and Esther let go of me and knelt to pray, Barb stumbling and falling to her knees almost on top of her, and the sky was clear and crisp except in the east where the fumes of the quarry blurred the tops of the trees with a vapor like blue fur, and the heavens turned a sickly, blank no-color, the color of the world when your eyes are shut, above the dark halls of the Profane Industries. And Mary was motionless, silent. The doctor got tired of pushing buttons on whatever instrument of Satan was in his hand. “You didn’t do this!” he roared. “You couldn’t have done this.”

“You better back off with those guns,” Mim told him, “or you’ll never find out.”

He sat and looked at her. He snapped the one side of his glasses down and looked at her through two lenses. Then he gave a cough. It turned into a bunch of coughs, which I realized was a laugh, but he wasn’t smiling. His mouth was iron-hard.

The laughter made a lot of spit, which he wiped off with his hand. All his white-coated people stood staring at Mim. A couple of the gunmen were smoking cigarettes. “Get up, you ninnies,” I said, pulling Esther and Barb by the backs of their collars. “Mim’s about to beat this heathen.”

They stood up blinking in the light as Dr. Stoll told Mim: “You’d better come with me.”

“No,” said Mim. “You can’t take me. I’m not part of your outfit. I haven’t signed anything for you and you’ve never copied my ID card and if you shoot me it’s murder in the first degree. You can have some of your people there come over and haul Mary away but she’ll never talk to you or do your bidding and you’ll never know why. You can take her apart or melt her down I guess but it would be a sorry waste. As one architect to another.”

He stared at her a moment longer. Then he smiled. “Well. There we are.”

“Looks that way to me,” said Mim.

He cleared his throat. “Judy,” he said, “come up here and take a seat. I want you to announce to these good people that they can go home.”

He climbed sideways from his chair into the van, seating himself beside the girl with the boil on the side of her nose, who immediately started talking, but he shushed her and peered out the window to see what was happening. The “Judy” he’d been talking to, I saw, was the girl with the shaved head and the sling. She tried to climb up into the chair but she kept on slipping and finally the boy with the metal teeth came over and helped her. She sat in the chair and picked up the metal cone but she didn’t say anything.

“Tell them to go home,” called the doctor from inside the van. “Tell them it’s over now.”

The girl said something into the cone. It was loud, but you couldn’t make out what it was. It was like “Umpf, eempf.” Like her mouth was stuck together. Me and Kat were gazing at each other in bewilderment when somebody behind us cried out, “Judy!”

Jonathan came hobbling across the field. “Judy!” he shouted.

“Jonathan, no!” said Mim. To the men standing around her she said desperately, “Stop him, catch him!” But nobody was going to go after the tall, lurching foreigner with the knapsack who’d hurtled out from among our very homes. As he passed Mim, she tried to grab him, and Dr. Stoll called from the van, “Now, now, my dear! Jonathan is under my jurisdiction. He is registered as my intern. I do possess copies of his identification papers. You will have to let him go.”

Jonathan turned to Mim. “Sorry,” he said.

She was just tall enough to come up to his ribs. He could have leaned on her as a man leans on a rake.

“You idiot,” she said.

“It’s Judy,” he stammered. “Something’s—he’s—I have to help her.”

“You’re gonna tell him everything, aren’t you,” Mim said dully.

“I’ll try not to.”

He limped toward the vans. Two gunmen came to guard him on either side. The boy with metal teeth helped Judy down from the chair. They all got into the vans and turned off their flashing lights and drove away. They didn’t let Jonathan sit with Judy. They put him in a different car.

• • • •

We cross the sea of glass and disembark on the other side. Here is the city. “Which city?” you ask, and I tell you, “It is The Object City.” The Object City is broad and high. Its wall is an hundred and forty and four cubits, according to the measure of the angels. The wall has twelve foundations. The first foundation is jasper, the second, sapphire, the third, a chalcedony, the fourth, an emerald. I can feel you receding. You ask me very slowly, “Why are the edges moving?” and then, with an effort, “Why is it so tangled?” The fifth, sardonyx; the sixth, sardius; the seventh, chrysolyte. The Object City looks like a cloud of black and white specks. It looks like an opera cloak. It looks like a flock of swans in flight. It looks like stars. It looks like an horror of great darkness. The eighth, beryl; the ninth, a topaz; the tenth, a chrysoprasus. Because you are sinking fast, I don’t tell you the true name of The Object City, which is The Object World. Instead, I tell you, “This is Jericho, your own Jericho. In the night you are awakened by a wildcat’s cry.” I say, “In the morning you will find the prints of the deer that come down from the mountains. They have pawed up the snow to eat the grass in the orchard.”

Now you will have a little sleep. When you wake, we will try again to enter the city.

The eleventh, a jacinth. The twelfth, an amethyst.

IF SHE STRAYS, SHE CAN COME BACK

(Sometimes the early summer is so happy it calls to me. I have to go out. I go outside after supper, I stay outside for hours. How thick the rhubarb grows out back and oh how sweet the beans. I lie in the flowers, drenched with their perfume, and feel the dew come down. It touches my eyelids like a cold hand. When I open my eyes the heavens are filling like a bowl with glowing summer dark. A night so blue you can feel it in your lungs. My little boys know this mood. They charge outside, play around me, wild as goats. These will be their best memories, for this is their favorite mother. She allows everything. She is flopped down in the beans. They run around, chasing fireflies. Baby Levi’s diaper sags and his brothers pull it off him, laughing, and chuck it over the fence. Levi runs half-naked, shrieking for joy. I know if I sit up I’ll see Sam’s shadow at the kitchen window, pacing back and forth with increasing energy until he works up enough frustration to come out and call us in. How, he will demand, can I let the boys act like this? Don’t I know how it looks? I don’t sit up. I am struck down by the sky. I think of Sam, his long hot days of toil spent in a noble pursuit, scattering seed to make the land flourish. And what of the land? Does it feel that its work is noble? What of the horses plodding up and down beneath the glinting whip? The boys are roughhousing close to me. They kick me in the ribs. Levi treads on my breastbone. Is this a noble pursuit? Now the moon comes out from behind the clouds, filling the branches of the old crabapple tree with mellow light. “Noom!” crows Levi, pointing. “Noom!” I clutch his pretty leg. He giggles and bends to plant his fat palms on my neck. And gives me a kiss smelling of dirty milk, wobbling, losing his balance, hitting my face too hard, our foreheads knocking. Oh, you—the one I write to in the flicker of the lamp—what do you want from me, or for me? What is your desire?)

I woke up to a rattle at the window. My heart lifted. I thought, It’s Sam! But then I realized he was in the bed beside me. We were no longer courting; we were married. I went downstairs, pulled Sam’s big coat on, and opened the door, and there was Mim.

“Hello Lyddie,” she said; and “Hi Lyddie!” said Mary.

Mim sat in a cart. Her head was bare. Her hair hung loose and tangled as the bracken. The cart was attached to Mary, who still wore her neat black cap. Fresh, cold moonlight glimmered on her face.

“What is this contraption?” I asked, shivering.

“Well,” said Mim, “it’s a kind of carriage. Like the one you saw the other night, for Jonathan. This one’s a little bigger, though.”

I noticed several dark bundles around her, and Hochmut poking his nose over the slats.

“You’re going away, then?”

She nodded. “I came to say goodbye.”

“With no cap?” I asked, my eyes filling with tears.

“That’s my disguise.”

I laughed, blinking. “A fine disguise. You won’t get far. Not in this—half-carriage, half-woman. You’ll stick out like a rash.”

“I don’t have to get far. Just to the Profane Industries.”

“Jonathan?” I whispered.

“I can’t leave him, can I? I intend to spring him before he spills my secrets. I might take that bald-headed girl, too. His friend, Judy. She looked like she could use a change of occupation.”

I shook my head. “Mim.” Then, as I noticed one of her bundles looking at me with a pair of large, scared eyes, I gasped: “Mim! Is that your mother?”

“I couldn’t very well leave her behind! Uncle Al worries her. Besides, she might be useful.”

She patted her mother’s shoulder. “Right, Mommy?”

Her mother gave a trembling smile.

“I can’t let you do this. Leave her with me. I’ll keep her.”

“No. She doesn’t like to be parted from me. She’ll shred your sheets, and you won’t like it. And besides, I want her. She’s trusty in a pinch.”

“There’s nothing I can say to make you change your mind?”

“Why would I come out at midnight in this contraption just to change my mind? No, I’m bent on going, so you might as well stop crying.”

“But you—and Mary—you’ll never—I’ll never see you again.”

“That’s for the Good Lord to decide.”

After a moment she said in a softer tone: “Come, now. Don’t take on. You have Sam Esh, for what he’s worth. Soon you’ll have a baby. Don’t begrudge me my poor old mother, or this bag of bones I call a dog. Or Mary. After all, she came to me.”

I wiped my eyes and looked at her.

“It was on the seventh round,” she said in the same low, thoughtful tone. “Do you ever think of that? I found her on the seventh round. When we were all looking for the ones we’d be with forever. I walked right into her.”

“We were supposed to see ghosts or photographs. Not something hard like that.”

“Well.” She smiled. “It’s just a fancy. Tell the girls I said goodbye.”

She gave Mary no instructions, and I couldn’t see that she touched her at all, but Mary started off, pulling the cart eastward.

(The next year, at Old Christmas, I stood at the window holding baby Jim and watched a group of girls go down the road. They crowded together, hurrying over the snow, their breath excited, white and quick. They meant to go around a barn. I thought I heard a burst of laughter floating on the air. Oh, sweet girls, I thought, what do you hope to find? Don’t you know that somebody always has to be sacrificed? Ask the animals—it’s all they talk about. Then, rocking the baby to calm myself, I thought of Mim. I thought of her breaking down the fence around the Profane Industries. I thought of her getting caught, and then I stopped. I didn’t want to think of that, and I still try not to think about it. I still see her, always, always. I make up stories for her in my head, when I’m doing the wash, when I’m scrubbing the porch with silver sand. I see her rescuing Jonathan from a dark hole underground. They have to jump across an invisible wire. They have to scale a wall. I see her traveling the country, her loins girded, her shoes on her feet, and her staff in her hand, eating her bread in haste. Jonathan rides in the cart with Mim’s mother and the dog. They come to the rivers, the floods, the brooks of honey and butter. And Mary, striding alongside Mim, is almost like her sister. She is like a portrait of Mim in metal. She looks the way she did the last time I saw her, in front of my own house in the moonlight: distant, almost as if she doesn’t know me at all. But she does know me. “Hi Lyddie!” Some part of me remains inside her head, just as Hochmut, even now, would recognize my scent. I make stories for her, and I give her noble pursuits, because you wouldn’t—would you?—you wouldn’t create a character and make it a machine.)

© 2018 by Sofia Samatar.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sofia Samatar is the author of the novels A Stranger in Olondria (2013), The Winged Histories (2016), and the short story collection, Tender (2017). Her next book is Monster Portraits. Her work has received the John W. Campbell Award, the William L. Crawford Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the World Fantasy Award.

NPC

Charles Yu | 2940 words

Moon base six is visible in the distance, but you keep your eyes down. You keep them trained on the ground, in the patch in front of you. You have your sensor and your collection tool and you’re going to find iridium. There. There’s some iridium. Awesome. The tool hoovers it up. Cha-ching.

• • • •

Moon base six over there. Close but far. Eyes down, like always, fixed on the iridium patch. You have your sensor, your collection thingy. Iridium is so rare. Really, really rare. You’d be lucky if you—oh wait. The sensor is saying you got some. Cha-ching.

• • • •

You warm up your Lean Cuisine in the break room. Pasta primavera and a can of Sprite Zero. Oh shit, Carla’s here. You try to hand-comb your hair a little. She smiles. Oh shit oh shit. She’s having a Cup Noodles and a Dr Pepper. You move your iridium collection tool off the table on the off chance she wants to sit across from you. She says don’t worry about it and your stomach drops a foot. And then she comes around the table and sits right next to you. Oh shit oh shit oh shit. You talk for seventeen whole minutes, the rest of your lunch break. As you’re putting your bio-suit back on, you notice you are lightly sweating. It feels good.

• • • •

Moon base six. What, maybe one fifty, two hundred yards away? You could get there in thirty seconds. Flat-out sprint. You could do it. You’ve seen fast, watched them do it. You know it can be done. You’re not sure why, but you feel it—there’s more to it than just this. You have big things ahead of you.

Cha-chung. Iridium. Big piece. It’s been a good week.

• • • •

Is Carla seeing anyone? You ask around a little. Mixed messages, but bottom line what you are hearing is that she’s available. You have no chance. But. Hmm. You never know.

• • • •

Moon base six. You do the work. The day goes fast. You keep your eyes down, but your head is in the stars. Iridium, schmiridium. Carla carla carla.

• • • •

Plasma rains down on the surface of the planet, melting almost everything into molten death. In other words, it’s Tuesday. This week, though, you’re standing right here, in the crease. Stay away from the crease. Far far away. That’s what they teach you in training. They never explain why, but you know better. Stuff happens in the crease. Weird stuff. You can always get iridium there. You hoover it all up, leave for a few minutes, come back, and there it is. So, no. You’re not going to stay away from the crease. What do they think, you’re an idiot?

Apparently, you are an idiot.

Because this Tuesday, when the plasma rains down, melting everything, molten death, blah blah blah, et cetera, you’re standing in the crease when it happens. There is so much iridium coating your bio-suit, it’s fusing into a protective layer, shielding you.

The whole of creation seems to be falling down from above, raining down on your head, and you’re in your suit, feeling all warm and fuzzy inside. Tingly. You check your body parts, which seem intact. Fine. More than fine, in fact.

You seem to have been . . . changed.

• • • •

Moon base six. Right there. Now there’s a whole mess of activity. Preparations being made, fanfare, all kinds of official-looking window dressing going up. There is literally a red carpet being rolled out toward the landing dock. Rumor has it CENTCOM Council is coming to investigate the incident. The Incident. That’s what they’re calling it. That’s not what you’d call it, though. You don’t know what you’d call it yet.

• • • •

There’s that dude. He’s right there. In the middle. Of everything. At all times. Did he just grab his junk? He just grabbed his junk.

Get back to your iridium mining, someone says. You look up and see a CENTCOM non-commissioned officer, about five feet above you, riding one of those hover pads. You wonder if he realizes how much of a tool he is, balancing on that thing. You wish you could just take your iridium-collection thingy and whack him right in the nuts.

• • • •

You whack him. Not in the nuts. In the shin. Which is probably worse, because it sounds like it shatters on impact.

• • • •

People lose their minds. They have no idea what to do with you.

They are taking you down to the base. Holy crap. You are in an actual Jeep, actually riding toward the actual base. You cannot believe it. You look around, try to take it all in. You have no idea what has happened. One day you’re an iridium-mining grunt, working for four and a quarter chits per year, on, like, a billion-year contract or something, and the next thing you know, you’re zooming toward Moon base six with electromagnetic restraints on and two plasma rifles trained at your head. You are smiling like an idiot.

• • • •

The smiling probably pissed them off, them being the dudes on the other ends of those plasma rifles, because you wake up in an antigravity holding cage floating ten feet off the ground. You’re floating around, bumping into the walls and ceiling of the cage. Your head is throbbing, probably because they clocked you in the skull with the butt of an RZT-195, but it was worth it. You’re still smiling, although a little less obviously.

Hey, you say.

What?

One of the dudes turns to the other. They both look perplexed.

Did he just?

Yeah.

Huh.

Hey, you say again.

Stop talking. You aren’t supposed to be talking.

Huh. Okay. Well, I am.

• • • •

Again with the smashing of the skull. This time, your brain feels like it’s broken. That last hit did something. Between the plasma storm and having your brain bashed, you don’t feel quite yourself anymore.

You know better than to smile again. You’re not in the cage anymore. Now you’re being walked down a long corridor. This corridor is ridiculous, how long it is. Is it repeating? It seems like it’s repeating. There are doors as far as the eye can see. Doors, doors, doors. You know better. You could easily kick a dude from behind, maybe sucker-punch the other one with both cuffed fists and then smash through one of these doors. They all probably lead somewhere. Technically. There are rooms on the other sides of those doors. Maybe a break room, two people sitting at a table, staring at each other. In silence. For eternity. Just blinking. Maybe one goes to the microwave to refill a coffee mug every few hours. You’ve been in those rooms. You know what it’s like. You don’t want to be in those rooms anymore. Ever. Again. These fools think you’re a flight risk, so their fingers are on triggers. Little do they know, they’re leading you right to exactly where you want to be. You have no idea where that is, only that it’s at the other end of this corridor. A corridor is good. Interesting stuff happens in corridors. You’ve always wanted to be here. Right here. Somewhere. Wherever this is. Inside. On the map. Not out there in the infinite fields of iridium. They think they’re guarding you, but really, they’re escorting you. Right to your destiny.

• • • •

This is him?

She says it so dismissively, you want to melt into a puddle on the table. You may be in love. You are definitely in lust. This is Oona Bantu, which is a ridiculous name for a very serious person. Bio-suit helmet off, long red hair pulled back into a tight ponytail. Stripes on her sleeve make her seem like someone important. This is good.

What’s your name?

Name?

Yeah. You have a name don’t you?

Uh, one of the dudes tries to break in.

Shut up, Sergeant. I was talking to him, she says, indicating you with a pointed, sexy finger. Everything is so sexy about her.

I don’t, I don’t.

You don’t what? You don’t know your own name?

I don’t have a name. Ma’am.

That’s, uh, what I was trying to tell you, Commander.

Shut the hell up, Corporal.

Yes, ma’am.

Also, you should have told me.

Yes, ma’am.

Super Sexy Commander Lady turns her attention back to you.

So. An NPC, huh?

• • • •

After all these years, it’s a weird feeling to know the name. Of what you are. You’ve heard that term before, but without understanding the context or what it stands for (you still aren’t sure—although your awareness, like a spreading gas, is starting to creep around the edges of the term and you feel that soon it may come to you, all at once). Now this CENTCOM officer from twenty thousand light-years away has come all this way. And for you. For you!

• • • •

It works. You get a promotion, then a gun. They start sending you out on missions. You get stats, a profile, a backstory. You get hit points. Just a few, at first. People know your name. Oona Bantu knows your name. Sometimes she flirts with you in the elevator. You level up, then you level up again. With every mission you can feel it more and more. You don’t know how it happened. Actually, you do. You finally took control of your own actions. You’re free. No more of that iridium-collection bullshit. No more Lean Cuisines in the break room. No more . . .

Carla.

Hmm.

Well, you can get Carla. Right? You’re you now. If she liked you before, of course she’s gonna like you now. You just need to know how to keep this going. So far, it’s worked. Just do the worst possible thing you can think of doing. And then do something worse. Something you would never imagine anyone doing in any situation.

You go on missions. You level up. Up and up and up you go. Your armor looks great. You catch sight of yourself in the reflection of your pod craft and, you hate to say it, but you kinda look like a badass. How did this happen? You hover over the grunts in the iridium fields. Poor suckers. If only they could see what you see, the world from up here.

• • • •

There are just a couple of things that bug you.

You used to be stuck down there, with those losers. And your life was the same every day. Wake up, brush teeth, put on the bio-suit. Get the thingy, use the thingy to collect iridium. At the end of the day, detach the basin, load it into the spectrometer. The number pops up, you get your chits for the day, and that’s that. Every day the same. Every single crap day the same.

Now, you’re a player. You get to do what you want, when you want. When you’re not doing what you want, you get to chill out here, in this air-conditioned lounge with couches and free snacks and a cappuccino maker, waiting for the next mission. The music is a little repetitive, but the people are cool, if a little aloof. You’re you now. That’s something. It means something. It’s just that—how do you say this—to keep this going, you can’t help but feel as if your days aren’t any more free than they were before. They might even be, and you can’t believe you’re saying this, less free. How is that possible? You don’t know. But it is.

That’s the first thing that bothers you. The second thing is Carla.

• • • •

You don’t know if she doesn’t recognize you now that you’re kind of a badass or what. Whatever it is, when you wave at her, from a pod craft or if you’re doing a perimeter sweep of moon base six, she doesn’t wave back. She sometimes gives a little smile, but you can’t tell if it’s because she still remembers your lunch chats or if maybe she’s just smiling because a second grade lieutenant is waving at her. Plus, the smile she gives you is one of those sad smiles.

All of which is to sort of make it a little more understandable that when Oona Bantu comes to your quarters wearing just her under-skin armor, you don’t turn her away. She comes to sit on your bunk, and things get a little kissy for a hot and sweaty five minutes, and you feel really terrible the whole time and confused but also you are kissing Oona Bantu, so you don’t stop right away, but then Carla’s sad little smile face keeps inserting itself into your head and you break off the kissing and Oona can’t believe it. She just laughs, gathers her underthings, and walks out of your room.

You don’t know if it was that whole weirdness with Oona or what, but after that day in your quarters, you kind of hit a plateau in your career. The leveling up slows down. No more weapons upgrades. Your number doesn’t come up as often, and those missions you do get seem smaller, more like diversions, just messing around. And the thing is, you don’t even get to see Carla anymore. You got transferred to base nine, which is on the other side of the moon.

• • • •

Mission selected. Gear up. Player chosen. Save save save. Complete the mission. Power down.

• • • •

Mission selected. Gear up. Player chosen. Kill kill kill. Complete the mission. Power down.

• • • •

Mission selected. Gear up. Player chosen. Blah blah blah. Complete the mission. Blah blah blah.

• • • •

Mission selected. Gear up. Player chosen.

You look at the brief.

Moon base nine, collateral damage acceptable.

The ride over is only twenty minutes, but it feels like half a day. As you reach the base, the twin suns rise on the horizon. Oona’s up front, barking orders—she’s leading the mission—but all you can think of is Carla. You know she’s in that base somewhere, in one of the five thousand rooms. If only you could guess which one.

• • • •

Blam. Blam. Ska-doosh. Ska-doosh.

Your team rips through the east wing in a minute forty-five, then up to the second floor and the third, clearing out the entire side of the building in four flat. Oona radios for your squad to secure the wing and await further instructions. A couple of the guys use vending machines as target practice. Wanger decides he’s going to flush a grenade down the toilet. You tell him you’ll stand guard in the hallway, but no one really seems to care as you wander down the corridor, peeking into rooms here and there. Nothing to see, nothing to see. A couple of randoms walking into corners here and there. You hear Wanger and Gutierrez messing around back there. Sounds like they’re torturing a couple of NPCs for fun. For a minute you think of going down and saving them, because it’s not cool and also against an actionable offense punishable by court-martial, but mostly because, hell, you haven’t forgotten where you came from. Hey, you say, and turn back to go knock some sense into those two idiots, but then from a door behind you, you hear a soft voice say, Yes? And you recognize the voice.

You poke your head into a generic break room, not meant for any kind of action, barely even rendered. A table, a few chairs, a fridge, and a microwave. And Carla, sitting there, staring straight ahead. She looks scared. You take off your helmet, try to hand-comb your hair a little, give her a second to process. When she recognizes you, her eyes soften, and she says:

I know you. Or, at least, I used to. Right?

Yeah.

Look at you. Wow. I mean. Wow.

You look great.

At this, she blushes. You want to hug her, or reach out and take her to safety, or marry her, or something, but you have an ionized plasma rifle in one hand and an RPG launcher in the other. In your ear-comm, Oona’s voice blares out, all staticky and aggressive. Base is clear. Mission complete. Return to shuttle. Your feet don’t move. You feel pulled, like you know you’re supposed to go back. It’s all wrong. First you were trapped, shuffling around like a mindless iridium-collecting zombie. But your thoughts were free. And then that plasma storm, and whatever came next. You could move your body, go where you wanted, but it was your mind that felt trapped, controlled by something else. This job, this life, whatever it is. And now, standing here, you have a choice. You want what you want and you can’t help it. Oona’s voice blurts again, all units accounted for except for one. Lieutenant, you headed back? You copy?

You take off the rest of your suit, throw it in a pile in the corner, blast it into nonexistence with your plasma rifle. You go into the freezer, pull out a Lean Cuisine, start it in the microwave. Wait right here, you say to Carla, and you take both weapons, go into another room, and leave them there for some other sucker to find. When you go back to the room, Carla is sitting, staring forward. She takes a second to recognize you again. Oh hey, she says. Hey, you say and you sit down and wait for your lunch to defrost.

© 2015 by Charles Yu. Originally published in Press Start to Play, edited by John Joseph Adams and Daniel H. Wilson. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Charles Yu is the author of three books, including the novel How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, which was a New York Times Notable Book and named one of the best books of the year by Time magazine. He was nominated for two WGA awards for his work on the acclaimed HBO series, Westworld, and has also written for upcoming shows on AMC and HBO. His fiction and non-fiction have been published in a number of publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times, Slate and Wired. His novel, The Book of Wishing, is forthcoming from Pantheon. He also served as guest editor of Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017.

Stone Wall Truth

Caroline M. Yoachim | 8080 words

Njeri sewed the woman together with hairs from a zebra tail. Her deer-bone needle dipped under the woman’s skin and bobbed back out. The contrast of the white seams against her dark skin was striking.

“The center seam makes a straight line,” Njeri told her apprentice, “but the others flow with the natural curves of the body, just as the Enshai River follows the curve of the landscape.”

Odion leaned in to examine her work, his breath warm on the back of her neck. Foolish boy, wasting his attention on her. Njeri set her needle on the table and stood up to stretch. The job was nearly done—she’d repositioned the woman’s organs, reconstructed her muscles, sewn her body back together. Only the face was still open, facial muscles splayed out in all directions from the woman’s skull like an exotic flower in full bloom.

“Why sew them back together, after the wall?” Odion asked. “Why not let them die?”

Njeri sighed. The boy had steady hands and a sharp mind, but his heart was unforgiving. He had been eager to learn about the cutting, about the delicate art of preparing a patient to hang from the wall. What he questioned was the sewing, the part of the work that had drawn Njeri to this calling. She studied the woman on the table—the last surviving grandchild of Radmalende, who had been king when the country was ruled by kings instead of warlords. The two of them had come of age the same spring, and had taken their adulthood rites together. That had been many years ago, but it was hard for Njeri not to think of her childhood friend by name. “You think I should leave her to die?”

“Her bones were black as obsidian.” He traced the center seam with his finger.

Njeri said nothing. She admired the woman for her strength; she hadn’t cried or protested or made excuses. Few women were put on the wall, but this one had faced it as bravely as any man, braver than some. And her shadowself had been like nothing Njeri had ever seen. Dark, of course, but a tightly controlled blackness, an army of ants marching out from her heart and along her bones. A constantly shifting shadow that never rested too long in any one place.

“She made a play for the throne. Killed six Maiwatu guardsmen in the process. Her attack has opened the way for the Upyatu. I heard a rumor today the capitol is still under siege.” Odion masked the worry in his voice, but Njeri knew he was concerned. He had many friends in the upper echelons of the ruling class—it was how he came to be apprenticed to the highest-ranking surgeon at the longest stretch of wall.

“There is always unrest in the capitol.” Njeri didn’t add that this woman had a stronger claim to the citrine throne than most. “Besides, it’s not our place to say what people deserve. General Bahtir pays us to take people apart and put them back together, not to judge them.”

Njeri nudged Odion aside. She settled back into her stool, and he went outside to set some water boiling for tea. He didn’t appreciate being pushed away, didn’t understand why she didn’t want him the way he wanted her. She wanted to tell the boy to find someone his own age, someone who liked boys, but Odion wouldn’t listen. Njeri returned to her work. The woman’s jawbone hung slack below her skull, but her mouth still closed around the clear stone that held her mind while Njeri patched her body together. The woman’s eyes stared up at the thatched straw roof, empty, with nothing but bone surrounding them. Flayed open, everyone looked wide-eyed and afraid. Njeri visualized how her muscles should fit together to recreate her strong chin and high cheekbones.

“Ever wonder what you’d look like on the wall?”

Njeri tensed at the interruption, then relaxed. Odion knew better than to startle her while she sewed, but she hadn’t taken up the needle yet. The boy was certainly persistent in seeking her attention. She considered his question. The work she did was good, healing those who came off the wall, but she had her share of secrets, her share of shame. Life demanded dark things sometimes, she didn’t need the wall to tell her that. What would her balance be? She hoped the good in her would be enough to cancel out the darkness, but she could not say for sure.

“I do,” Odion said, finally. “Wonder, I mean. I’ve never seen anyone clean—not on the smaller wall in Zwibe, and not here.”

“True, that.” Njeri picked up her needle, ending the conversation, and began to reconnect the muscles of the woman’s mouth. She stitched the entire face together without taking a break, though by the end her fingers ached.

When the sewing was finished, Njeri made Odion examine her work. It served two purposes. First, it was good for the boy to learn the ritual of checking and rechecking before the patient was restored to consciousness. Ripping out seams already sewn was a tedious process, but a mistake caught now could be corrected. After the mindstone was removed, however, mistakes meant pain and often death. She had to train the boy to be observant, to notice the slightest error. Second, of course, was that Odion’s eyes and hands were fresh—he was more likely to catch a mistake if she’d made one.

Odion ran his fingertips up the seam of the woman’s left arm, then down the seam of her right. His touch was firm enough to feel both the surface seam and the muscles underneath, allowing him to test the depth of the stitches. He tested the woman’s legs, her chest, and finally her face. He didn’t speak as he worked.

“Flawless,” he said. “You never make mistakes.”

“I’m well-practiced now,” Njeri answered, “I made my mistakes before your time.”

She laid her fingers on the cool flesh at the base of the woman’s neck. Odion might be more likely to catch a mistake, but that did not relieve Njeri of her obligation to check her own work. She pressed her fingers along the center seam, sliding her hand between the woman’s breasts and over the gentle rounding of her belly. Her body was softer than Njeri’s, an alluring contrast to the fierceness she had shown in facing the wall. Where Njeri was lean and angular, this woman was feminine and curved. Njeri lost her place and had to backtrack her pattern along the seams.

“Did I miss something?” Odion asked, frowning. He placed his hand over Njeri’s.

“No,” Njeri said. She moved her hand away and finished tracing the seams.

Confident that she had made no errors, Njeri slipped her thumb and index finger into the woman’s mouth, which was dry and cool, preserved in a state of half life. She grasped the mindstone and pulled it free. The woman’s muscles tensed, then relaxed.

Odion held out a cup of hibiscus mint tea, but Njeri waved it away. Too soon. The woman’s eyes were closed, she wasn’t ready to face the world. She remained motionless, as though the stone was still in her mouth. Even her breath was shallow, as though she begrudged the rising and falling of her chest.

Odion shifted his weight from foot to foot, refusing to be still. Patience was not a virtue he possessed. Perhaps the young were never patient. Njeri had not been, when she was Odion’s age. Noticing her attention, Odion thrust the cup forward again. Njeri took it.

The woman’s eyes opened, clear and dark.

“The light of the wall shines upon us and reveals our shadows,” Njeri said. “Its light is the gift of a race long gone from this earth. You have faced the wall and returned. Speak your name and you may go.”

These were the ritual words that Talib had taught her, when she was in training. There was a falseness to them, for no patient was ever ready to leave so soon after being awakened, and none saw their ordeal as a gift. But the speaking of names was good, for it confirmed that the mind had returned from the stone. A name provided continuity between time before the wall and time afterwards.

“Kanika.” Her voice was breathy and weak. Odion pulled her shoulders up and pushed a wedge of bundled straw behind her back so she could sit. Njeri tipped the cup against Kanika’s lips, slowly pouring tea into her mouth. For every sip she swallowed, two spilled down her neck and over her chest. Njeri gave the empty cup to Odion to refill it.

“My son?” Kanika asked. “Bahtir’s men came for my son.”

General Bahtir put only his most powerful enemies on the wall, for fear that if he killed them they would curse him from the Valley of the Dead. A child, even one with royal ancestry, did not pose enough of a threat to be spared.

Odion returned with more tea. “Drink,” he said, pressing the cup into Kanika’s hands. Njeri reached to take it from her, but she clutched the carved wood in her fingers and drained the cup.

“I remember,” she said, “I feel myself open on the wall. Like looking in from the outside.”

Her hands shook. Had there been any tea left, it would have sloshed over the sides. “So much darkness I never knew was there, and my son is dead by now, because I couldn’t protect him. I failed him. You should have killed me. There’s nothing left of me worth saving.”

Njeri took the cup. She wanted to cradle Kanika in her arms and comfort her, but she had to act as a surgeon, not as a friend. She searched for something she could do to ease Kanika’s pain. The stone that had held Kanika’s mind still sat beside her on the table. Rainbows swirled beneath the clear surface of the smooth stone. It was a relic of the Ancients, made from the same glassy material as the wall.

“Here.” Njeri picked up the mindstone and pressed it into Kanika’s hand. “To remind you that there is light inside you, too. The colors in this stone are the echoes of your mind.”

“There are not so many stones that we can give them freely,” Odion said. He scowled at Njeri. “You’re treating her differently because she’s a woman, because you knew her before the wall.”

There was truth to that, but Njeri did not retract her offer. Kanika stared into the stone. “So pretty. Light without shadows. I could swallow it, and drift away from my pain.”

“You would have no way to return, if you changed your mind,” Njeri said.

Kanika smiled, but her eyes were sad. “I speak of escape, but that has never been my way, you know that. Holding life at such a distance would be like not living at all, too big a price to pay.”

Odion reached for the mindstone, to take it from her, but she closed her fingers over it.

“I may not be able to use the stone,” she told him, “but I cannot give it up. It is my light, and I carry much darkness.”

• • • •

Heat rose from the cracked-mud earth. The stars winked in and out of existence at the edge of Njeri’s senses, their light distorted by miles of wavering sky. Beyond the thatched rooftops of the village, rolling hills of dry grass stretched into the darkness. Kanika leaned against Njeri as they walked across the village to the healer’s hut.

“I wish I could go home,” Kanika said. “I want to pull into myself and sleep. I feel like I could sleep forever.”

“Your punishment is ended. You could leave for home tomorrow, if you wished,” Njeri said, but she hoped that Kanika would stay.

“Ended? The wall was the worst, Njeri, but my punishment will last until I die. Anyone who sees my skin will know that I hung on the wall. Do you think people will forgive me? Embrace me into their lives?”

“Any man worth having would want you still,” Njeri said. “Or any woman.”

Njeri couldn’t read Kanika’s expression. Was there interest there?

“You don’t know what it’s like to be up on the wall. The things I saw . . .” Kanika brought her hand to her heart, digging her fingers into the fabric of her shirt to press against the seams in her skin.

“Dreams from the mindstone. Many of my patients have spoken of such visions.”

“No. There is only truth on the wall,” Kanika said. “I thought, before I went on the wall, that I wouldn’t have shadows. But I was only adding self-deception and arrogance to the list of my flaws.” Her words came in a steady stream, with only the barest pauses for breath. “No one can understand me, not with these scars. Not because of how I look, but because I know my shadowself.”

Kanika fell silent as they approached a cluster of Bahtir’s guardsmen. Normally they patrolled the periphery of the village in pairs, so it was unusual to see them gathered in the road. Several men shook their shields, zebraskins stretched taut over oval frames. Strands of human teeth hung below and rattled as the shields moved. One man ran his fingers over the tigers-eye clasp that held his threadbare orange cloak closed, and another tapped the butt of his spear against the dirt. The guardsmen were on edge tonight.

One of the men stepped forward to stop the women, then recognized Njeri and saw Kanika’s scars. He signaled to the others, and the entire group turned and headed back towards the guardhouse, a large clay-brick building at the outskirts of the village. When they had gone, Kanika pulled out her mindstone. In the moonlight there were no rainbows, only swirls of a silvery blue. “This is what I thought I was. I was so foolish.”

“That is as much a part of you as the shadows are,” Njeri said.

“We all have darkness,” Kanika said.

Njeri had heard this from many of her patients. It was a source of great comfort for them to think that they were not alone in having shadows. Sometimes Njeri wondered if there was truth in their assertion. There was no way to know; the innocent weren’t sentenced to hang on the wall. “You’ve lived your life well, despite your darkness. Doesn’t that give you some comfort?”

“No, don’t you see? We all have darkness. All of us,” Kanika pulled away. “The wall is pointless. You torture people for no purpose.”

Kanika took a few steps, then stumbled. Njeri caught her. Her skin was moist with sweat—heat and exertion were taking their toll. “The wall is about revealing a person’s darkest truth. If they see their darkness, they can fight it. The knowledge can heal them.”

“It destroys them. It destroys me. And you condemn people to this torture.”

“I am the hands that do the work,” Njeri said. “I don’t decide who faces the wall.”

Kanika tried to pull away a second time, but she was too weak. “You pass judgment every time you open someone onto the wall. Don’t pass the responsibility to someone else. We all judge, and we all mete out our punishments. You saw how all the guardsmen fled at the sight of me.”

“Superstitious fools,” Njeri said.

They walked in silence to Durratse’s door. Njeri knew the old healer well, for he had cared for her for several months after her mother died. She watched carefully for his reaction when he opened his door. He hid his revulsion well, but she could see the slight flare of his nostrils, the falseness in his smile. She wondered how she’d failed to notice it with the other patients she’d brought him. Or perhaps he’d been more forgiving of the men.

“We all judge,” Kanika repeated.

Durratse led Kanika inside. It was late, so he did not invite Njeri in. He simply nodded his head and closed the door.

The roughly hewn wood of the door had shrunk with weather and age, and she could still see them through the gaps in the wood. She wanted to argue with Kanika, to defend herself. Kanika insisted on focusing on the worst of the wall, the worst of her, the cutting. Like Odion, she paid no mind to the important work of sewing. She healed people, just as Durratse did, and her patients needed more healing than anyone.

• • • •

When Njeri went out to stoke her cooking fire shortly after sunrise, the village was bustling with unfamiliar guardsmen. The new arrivals were Upyatu—a tall people, with broad flat feet. She watched them as she boiled plantains for breakfast. They were more boisterous than Bahtir’s men; they spoke in loud voices punctuated with barking laughter. Their heads were covered with elaborate beaded headdresses, and their shields were round and crimson. It could mean only one thing. The capitol had fallen.

Njeri pounded the boiled plantains into mash. It made little difference to her, the struggle for power. One general was replaced by another, but they all wanted the same work done. She wished for peace not out of support for any current ruler, but because in times of war she had to put more people to the wall. She took her mash back to the hut, where Odion was waiting.

“The new general brought two prisoners for the wall,” he said, speaking quickly. “He wants to hang them together.”

Njeri divided the mash into two bowls and topped each one with slices of green mango. How could Odion be excited about such a thing? The Maiwatu were his people. Besides, to put criminals on the wall was one thing, but to leave one there for the time it took to flay a second was cruel. Dissecting them simultaneously, but slowly, would be no better. “Cruelty. Already I dislike the man.”

Odion stirred his mash. “I thought, with two men, I might be charged with opening one of them.”

“We have but one obsidian blade,” Njeri said, “and the new general will want the services of a surgeon, not an apprentice. I will open them, and you will assist, as we have always done.”

A guardsman came to fetch them before they’d finished their morning meal. He was paler even than Odion, with a reddish tint to his skin, like dry dusty earth. Shorter, too, than most Upyatu warriors, and injured. Njeri could just make out the outlines of a bandage beneath the guardsman’s tightly fitted leather tunic.

“General Yafeu commands your presence,” the guardsman’s voice was nasal, and far higher pitched than Njeri expected. Not a man at all, but a woman with her breasts bound. The warrior laughed at Njeri’s surprise. “Call me Zola, and a woman. Bahtir would not allow women in the fight, he wanted them only for his bed. Yafeu is better. With him I can show my strength in both places.”

Zola grinned at Odion, exposing teeth sharpened into points. Her stare had an animal quality to it, something almost predatory. Judging from his reluctance to meet the woman’s stare, Odion did not find her aggression appealing. Njeri didn’t like it either; Zola had a showiness about her that was distinctly off-putting. Not like Kanika’s understated strength.

Njeri took up her obsidian blade, protected in its leather sheath. “The general will set us to work immediately then?”

“In a land where power shifts like flowing water, there is no later. Everything worth doing is worth doing now,” Zola glanced again at Odion, but again he gave her no response. She shrugged and led them to the guardhouse. A pair of goats were tethered outside, undoubtedly part of her payment for serving the new general.

Before they entered, Zola tapped the door three times with one end of her bow, announcing their arrival to those inside. The guardhouse looked the same as it always had. Sleeping bunks lined the walls, and supplies were stacked in neat piles beneath and around the beds. Only the occupants had changed, the Maiwatu guardsmen replaced by the Upyatu.

General Yafeu sat atop a makeshift throne at the back of the room. He was a young man, barely older than Odion, and he had surrounded himself with female guardsmen. His guards were in full uniform, but the general’s chest was bare except for a piece of vibrant yellow citrine that hung on a leather cord. It was carved into the shape of a lion’s head, reminiscent of the decorations on the citrine throne in the capitol. Two other stones hung from his belt, Bahtir’s tiger-eye and the rose quartz of Bahtir’s predecessor. At the base of Yafeu’s throne were two men, bound and gagged. Njeri was unsurprised to see that Bahtir was one of the prisoners. The other was a man she did not recognize.

Zola stood to left side of the general’s throne and whispered something into his ear.

“So you are the Surgeon of Stonewall,” Yafeu said.

“Yes,” she replied, “and this is my apprentice.” She did not bother with her name, or Odion’s, for Yafeu had the look of a man who cared not about such things.

“And the wall will show these men for the evil creatures they are?” Yafeu asked, gesturing at his prisoners and curling his lips as though the very thought of them repulsed him.

“The wall reveals the innermost secrets of our nature,” Njeri replied, “Those placed on the wall can hide nothing.”

Odion stepped forward. “If they have shadow in them, the wall will expose it.”

Njeri resisted the urge to rebuke her apprentice, but only because she didn’t wish to fight in front of the general. It was not his place to speak in this situation, and it diminished Njeri that he would misbehave like this.

General Yafeu laughed. “I like this apprentice of yours. He shows spirit, and a willingness to please.”

Njeri forced herself to nod and smile, even as Yafeu let his gaze linger on her apprentice. The general’s words held the promise of intimacy that Odion had long sought with Njeri, and the boy was lonely enough that he might be swayed by the man’s attention. She would have to be careful.

A guardsman entered without knocking and knelt, with his head bowed, in the center of the room. He was coated in sweat and dirt, and panted as though he had run the entire way from the capitol.

“Go.” Yafeu waved them away. “I will send you the prisoners when I’m finished here, and you can begin your work.”

• • • •

The wall was three times as tall as Njeri, and thicker than the length of her arm. It stretched twice the length of the village, winding east into the hills like a crystal snake. The morning sun glinted bright off the stones, if they could really be called stones. The wall was made from blocks as clear as glass, irregularly shaped but fit together so seamlessly that there was no need for mortar. According to Talib, the wall had once enclosed the entire nation of the Ancients. The fragments that remained were laid roughly in a circle, with the capitol in the center.

“The stone wall,” Yafeu said. “It’s more impressive than the pitiful fragment in Zwibe. Though neither looks anything like stone.”

Odion showed no reaction to the mention of his home village. Instead, he answered the unasked question in Yafeu’s comment. “They call it the stone wall because people used to throw stones at the condemned while they hung. You can see the cracks where rocks flew wide of their targets.”

“The practice was discarded centuries ago,” Njeri added, before Yafeu got any ideas. “You can see how damaging it was to the wall.”

Njeri did not mention that it also damaged the people that hung on the wall, making it impossible to sew them back together. General Yafeu shrugged, then waved his hand at the guardsmen. The two prisoners were marched out to stand before the wall. Njeri pressed her palm to the forehead of each man in a silent blessing. It was ironic that Bahtir, who had once feared the ghosts of the valley, now received a blessing that asked those same ghosts to protect him.

“Don’t do this,” Bahtir pleaded. She had heard such pleas before, many times, but never from a man who had ordered others onto the wall. The former general had always seemed so brave, but that had been an illusion of his power. Now that he had no power, he had no courage.

Njeri brushed her fingertips against the icy surface of the two mindstones in her pocket. She wondered if she would be brave, in Bahtir’s place. She liked to think that she would be, knowing that the wall revealed only the truth—nothing more and nothing less. Kanika had been brave. The thought of her called back her assertion that Njeri had been wrong to put people on the wall. Did these men deserve such punishment? It wasn’t her place to decide, it couldn’t be. Her job was to cut and to sew.

Odion paced in the periphery of her vision.

She put a mindstone into the mouth of the older man first, and left him on the ground at the base of the wall. She moved on to Bahtir. Two guardsmen held him in place, one gripping each of his arms. She slid the glassy stone between his lips, and the life flowed out of his body. The guardsmen held him against the wall, and she pinned him there, driving shards of amethyst through the nine sacred points—palms and feet, hips and shoulders, and the final point through the nook at the base of his throat. The amethyst penetrated through his flesh, just until the tips touched the wall, and yet the attraction between the lavender shards and the clear stone held Bahtir firmly. His head drooped as though he bowed it in remorse, but once he was opened, smaller amethyst pins would hold the muscles of his face, and his head would no longer hang.

Odion handed her the obsidian blade. Like the wall itself, the blade came from an older time. Mbenu, who made tools for the village, could knap a blade from obsidian, but his tools did not have the power of the Ancients in them. This blade slipped between the cells, and Njeri had learned through many years of training to trace the exact paths that would peel a man open without spilling a drop of blood.

Her first cut sliced only skin, beginning at the top of Bahtir’s forehead and moving down the midline, over his nose, and to his lips. There she paused and traced the outline of his mouth with the blade before picking up the midline once more. Chin neck, chest, groin, all without a drop of blood. The only loss was a strand of his hair that grew exactly on the midline. Sliced away by her blade, it fell to the base of the wall.

She sliced down the inner edge of each leg to the ankle, then drew the blade around to the front of each foot and into a gentle curve to the tip of the middle toe, completing the first vertical sequence. After that came a series of horizontal lines, branching out from the center. One cut along each arm, branching into five lines at the fingers. Evenly spaced cuts along the torso and legs so the skin would lie flat against the wall. Last, a series of lines radiating out from the center of his face, so that it would open like an exploding sun.

Light streamed through his skin. Any darkness on his surface was artificial, a trick of the eyes and not an indication of his being. On the wall, skin of every color let the same amount of light pass through. Njeri passed her blade to Odion and wiped the sweat from her face.

When she looked up, she saw Kanika, standing on the hillside, one face among many watchers. She stood near the top of the hill with the people of Stonewall, all of them staying as far from the wall as possible. The villagers had seen this many times, and attended now only because the general demanded it. A foolish demand, Njeri realized, for even if no one watched, the shame of these men would be forever sewn onto the surface of their skin. No army would follow a sewn general.

Everyone on the hill judged these men. All except Kanika. She was there to judge Njeri, and simply by having begun the flaying, she had failed. Standing at her side, Odion held the obsidian blade lightly, as though it was made of air from the night sky. When she took it from him, the weight of it pulled her down towards the earth. She had to ease the burden on her heart; she had to prove that Bahtir deserved this punishment. Instead of moving on to the next man, Njeri stayed with the former general, peeling away the muscles to get down to his bones.

She placed the tip of the blade on Bahtir’s breastbone, and leaned into it with all her weight. His breastbone split in two. She pried his ribcage open and revealed his shadows. They crawled like slugs from the core of his being, leaving trails of black slime behind them. This was her vindication, her proof that the punishment was just—but it was a hollow victory.

Njeri could feel the eyes of every man, woman, and child on the hillside, boring into the back of her neck. They looked at Bahtir, not at her, but she felt as though she was the one whose heart was exposed. She wanted to throw down her blade, or smash it to slivers against the wall.

The sunlight that passed through the wall cast no shadows. Even the stones that were flawed with a spiderweb pattern of cracks—scars from poorly aimed rocks of generations past—even those stones contained no darkness. Those imperfections on the wall simply broke the light into rainbows. It was a mockery of mankind. A mockery of Bahtir, whose shadowed heart was exposed for all to see.

Judging from the sun, it was mid-afternoon now, and a plate of untouched food sat behind her. Odion must have offered it, but she did not remember waving it off. The boy stepped forward and sprinkled water on Bahtir’s body to keep the tissue from drying out. When he finished, he came to her and put his hand on her shoulder. He could see that she was suffering, and Njeri knew he would gladly take over her task.

The second man lay unconscious in the dirt, his mind still locked away in stone. He was older, his hair a pale gray, almost white in the bright glare of the wall. Njeri could see the outline of his bones; he was underfed, or ill, or both. Njeri didn’t know the man’s name.

Two guardsmen held his limp body against the wall and Njeri pinned him into place. She raised her blade, holding it at the man’s head, at the starting point for the series of incisions she had made a hundred times before. It didn’t matter that the man was old. It didn’t matter that she didn’t know who he was or what he had done. She had opened Kanika, she could do this.

“Do you tire?” Odion whispered when the pause grew too long. “I can bear this burden for you.”

Njeri could not pass the blade to her apprentice, not at this moment, not in this way. Not even if the boy was ready, which Njeri doubted. This was a decision she had to make, to cut or not to cut. If she couldn’t open this man, it meant that Kanika had been right—that in thinking it was not her place to pass judgment, she had been judging just the same. The blade quivered in her hand, and a droplet of blood appeared on the man’s forehead.

“Give me the blade,” Odion said, holding out his hand.

“No,” Njeri said. This was her duty, and had been for many years. She could not escape from this, not now, not ever. To fail in her duty would be an act against General Yafeu. She could feel his gaze boring into her from the hillside, waiting, judging, finding her wanting.

“What is the delay?” General Yafeu called out. “Your task is not yet finished, woman.”

“Who is this man?” Njeri asked. “What is his crime?”

“That is no business of yours.” Yafeu’s voice held amusement. He found this entertaining. Like a circus act, or a play. This was the man who Njeri had trusted to pass judgment. If she had believed herself unfit to decide the fate of others, surely this man was worse. Which made Njeri worse for having accepted his orders.

Njeri couldn’t do it. She couldn’t open this man that she didn’t even know. She tore an amethyst pin out of his hand and reached for the one in his shoulder. Guardsmen rushed in to restrain her, and she put up no fight. The obsidian blade was taken from her.

“Open him,” Yafeu said, speaking to Odion.

“No!” Njeri cried. “Please, let him go.”

“At last, a statement with conviction.” Yafeu smiled. “Will you take his place, then? Do you believe so strongly in this man that you would face the wall instead of him?”

Njeri knew her motives weren’t pure. She wanted to save the man, yes, but not for his sake. She wanted to save him to make up for all the times she’d cut people open blindly. She wanted to make amends for opening Kanika without even asking of her crime. But surely it was better to do the right thing for the wrong reason than to not do it at all.

Odion stood before her. His eyes brimmed with tears. He had wanted to prove himself today, but not this way. Even with all his impatience and ambition, he still loved her. There was hope for him yet.

“Yes,” Njeri said. “I will take the man’s place.”

“Pin her up,” the general ordered. “Boy, you can gut them both.”

Njeri managed two steps toward Yafeu before the guardsmen closed in and restrained her. “It could kill him. Especially at the hands of the inexperienced.”

“You had your chance to do it, and if the boy kills him, the ghost will curse him, not me,” Yafeu said. “I can’t let an enemy go free.”

Njeri turned to Odion. “Open me first. I can stand to lose a few drops of blood, and you will do better with the old man if your hands are practiced with the blade.”

“I don’t have a mindstone,” he said. His whole body shook, and he reeked with the sweat of fear. “We only brought two mindstones.”

The general would not be pleased. She wondered if he would order her opened without the stone. That way would surely mean death.

“Take this one.” It was Kanika, her voice soft and close. In her hand was the mindstone that had held her mind, the one Njeri had given her to keep. The guardsmen moved to encircle her, but backed away at the sight of her scars. She was a ghost, a curse, a plague. Njeri couldn’t believe she hadn’t noticed it before, the punishment that continued after the wall.

“I will be there when you wake. We can face the world together,” Kanika said. She brushed her hand against Njeri’s cheek.

“Touching,” General Yafeu said, “but it’s time for you to go back to the hill. Unless you’d like another turn on the wall? I don’t think anyone has ever faced it twice.”

Kanika kissed Njeri’s forehead, exactly on the spot that Odion would begin the first incision. She lingered a moment more, then walked past General Yafeau and up to the top of the hill. Odion stepped forward. It hurt the boy to see Njeri with someone else, sharing the intimacy that he himself longed for.

“You and I will share a different bond, Odion,” she told him.

He nodded, and his jaw clenched as he prepared for what he must do. For a moment she feared he would refuse this duty, as she had done. It would anger Yafeu if he had to take his second prisoner to a lesser fragment of wall, and it would mean death for her and Odion—they had no claim to the citrine throne, their blood wasn’t powerful enough for Yafeu to fear their ghosts. She held her mouth open and waited.

Odion pressed the mindstone between her lips, and she closed her eyes and swallowed herself.

• • • •

The stone became her body. She sensed its boundaries, smooth and round. Her mind swirled restlessly inside. It felt like something was missing. She was indigo-blue. Perhaps green was missing? She searched and found flickering flecks of green, like emerald rain in her river of blue. She found red and yellow and purple. All her colors were here, but something was fundamentally wrong with this existence.

She pressed against the boundaries of her stone, and discovered thousands of tiny windows. Speckles of color were stuck to the edges of each opening. She tasted one of the windows, and the flavor of otherness repulsed her. She withdrew to the center of her stone, checking her threads of red and yellow, her flecks of green, her river of blue. She was intact.

Her churning nature sent her out to her boundaries once more, and she tasted each of the windows in turn. She began to develop favorite spots, flavors she returned to again and again. Her extremities oozed out through those windows, the ones that tasted best, and her strands of rainbow-self brought images from beyond the stone.

The first was Odion. The boy held the obsidian blade in his right hand, and a bundle of muscle tissue in his left. The tissue belonged to Njeri. The name came without the sense of self that she knew ought to accompany it. Njeri was a painting of a memory, hanging on the wall. Njeri was the body, and she was the stone, and yet they were the same.

Odion flayed Njeri open. Tiny beads of blood leaked out from misplaced seams and poorly detached muscles. The tip of the blade tore into her and isolated every thread of her being. Odion cut Njeri’s body apart, and every slice he made burned her in the space between her colors.

Odion plunged the blade into Njeri’s breastbone and pried her ribcage open. She burned like a white-hot flame, a blaze too strong for her river of blue to extinguish. Ragged black canyons stretched out from Njeri’s heart like festering wounds. Her colors recoiled from the darkness. Odion misted the body with water. The searing fire of pain died to glowing embers. He was finished, and he disappeared from her senses.

She stretched her colors towards the darkness. That was what was missing inside the stone. Her colors dimmed with the setting sun, but even as her red and yellow shifted into lavender and silver, there was no shadow. She reached into the dark canyons and tried to latch onto them, to pull the blackness out. Instead, the shadow pulled her inward, down through the center of Njeri’s heart, and into the wall itself.

Bahtir was beside her. The cuts she had inflicted on his flesh drew her further out of herself, closer to her patient and deeper into the wall. Echoes of Bahtir’s shadowself seeped out from his body and writhed in the cracks between the giant stones of the wall. She felt his flesh, still hanging, but he stayed inside his mindstone.

Someone new appeared. She recognized the woman by her shadow. Kanika. Tendrils of red and gold and green seeped out from Kanika’s mindstone, but they wandered aimlessly, without direction or purpose. Kanika had stretched out from her stone and seen visions on the wall, just as she had claimed, but the wall did not guide Kanika backwards. The wall did not pull everyone as it pulled her. She wanted to stay with Kanika, but the wall carried her away.

She moved backwards through time. She felt every cut of every man and every woman she’d ever flayed open, and still the torture did not end. Talib’s final patients were next, the ones that she had watched to learn his trade. Then people she didn’t know, stretching back before she was born, before Talib was born. The knowledge that passed from teacher to student across the generations bound them all together as surely as if they’d shared blood. She was tied to the surgeons, and that bound her to their patients.

An infant appeared on the wall. Black threads grew out from his heart like mold, and covered the insides of his ribs. His blackness barely moved, it was a constant, steady thing. She did not know if it was greed or fear or rage. Perhaps it was something she had no name for, because a shadow grew within her people before they had the words to name it. She felt the infant’s agony twice over—the searing heat of the blade that cut him open, and the anguish in her heart at learning that even the innocent held shadows.

Soon after that, she came to the earliest days of her people, when watchers threw stones at those who hung helpless on the wall. Each blow crushed her colors, smashing them together into a muddy brown.

Then, nothing.

She had seen all that the wall had to show her. She waited for Odion to return, to take her down. She sensed that in her distant present, Odion was taking the men down from the wall. The men, but not Njeri. He could not bear to heal her, after having seen her darkness.

The wall rebuilt itself.

Tiny fragments merged together to form a perfect ring of glassy stone. It happened so fast that she had no way to know what had destroyed the wall. All she knew was that it was whole now. The vastness of it made her feel small, a tiny raindrop of color in an ocean of stone and light.

Two Ancients touched the wall, and she felt them as though they touched her skin. It was the end of their time, and the knowledge of that fact filled them with sadness. She waited for the surgeon, the last true surgeon, but then she realized that each of the Ancients that touched the wall also held an obsidian blade. Moving in perfect synchrony, each Ancient sliced open the other. They controlled the blades in a way she did not understand, and even after they were opened, they continued to cut each other. The surgeon and the patient, the judger and the judged—in the time of the Ancients, both went together to the wall.

Like them, she knew both ends of the obsidian blade.

Odion appeared before her.

Not yet, she pleaded. They were almost done. She wanted to see the Ancients, to see if they had blackness. Odion began to take her down, removing the amethyst pins one by one as guardsmen held her in place. Her colors pulled back into her heart and towards her mindstone. With just one hand still pinned against the wall, she could not see the Ancients, but she could feel them, and what they did here was not punishment, it was not judgment. For them, the wall was love. The Ancients did not hide their shadows—not from each other and not from the wall. And in the moment of their union, when they lay open to each other, they drew knowledge from the wall. They absorbed the history of their people, the wisdom of countless generations.

She caught fleeting images of cities a thousand times larger than the capitol, and weapons that could scar the earth itself, and ships of glassy stone that sailed not on water but in space. Her river of blue wept in undulating strands of turquoise at the beauty and the horror of their past.

Njeri’s hand came free of the wall, and the connection was broken.

• • • •

She watched from the mindstone as two guardsmen placed Njeri on a stretcher. They moved the body to a table, and Odion spent hours stitching it together, stopping once to sleep. The boy made two mistakes, and had to tear out the seams and start again. It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter how long it took, or even if he never woke Njeri at all. She had been wrong about the wall, wrong about the blackness. They had taken something beautiful, and sullied it with their imperfections.

Odion checked every seam seven times, then reached into Njeri’s mouth. His touch shattered the boundaries of the stone. Her colors whirled outward, searching for structure. She dissipated into the space around her, traveling down her tendrils into Njeri’s body—her body—the form she had lived in all her life. The shape of the body was wrong, like a shell that was too big.

Her eyes wouldn’t open. Her body was desiccated and weak, and she couldn’t stretch tendrils into the world beyond. She longed for her colors, for the fullness of history within the wall, for the knowledge of the ancients. After such vivid truth, the drab reality of life seemed false.

Strong hands pressed against her back, and her body bent at the waist. She felt so brittle she feared the action would snap her in two. Something warm pressed against her lips. The world was out there, acting on her, shaping her body, inflicting this warmth. The heat spread down from her lips, over her skin and down her throat. It smelled of mint. Tea. Odion was giving her tea.

She wished she could open her eyes.

“The light of the wall shines upon us and reveals our shadows,” Odion said. “Its light is a gift, from a race long gone from this earth. You have faced the wall and returned. Speak your name . . .”

Njeri heard the words. She heard the boy falter, and waited for the rest. And you may go, she thought, prompting him to finish. But she found comfort in the pause. Comfort in knowing that Odion still did not want to let her go.

“Speak your name, and you may go,” Odion whispered.

Njeri opened her mouth, but no words came.

“Oh, Njeri,” Odion said, breaking with tradition and speaking her name before she had spoken it herself. “I would have sewed you sooner but the general forbade it. He insisted I start with Bahtir. But I didn’t check him. Not a single seam. I was too impatient to get to you. Then, after Bahtir died, a soldier stood guard while I sewed the second man, watching work she didn’t even understand to make sure I didn’t unleash another vengeful ghost . . . Oh, please don’t die. Please come back.”

She heard the desperation in his voice, but how could she go back to the world, after what she had done? She had ruined so many lives, on a wall that wasn’t meant to be used that way at all. Time passed, and more tea flowed over her. She passed through several cycles, the warmth of the tea followed each time by Odion’s words. She could not speak.

Kanika’s voice came from across the room. “You can’t hide forever, Njeri. Speak your name and come back to us.”

She was right. Njeri couldn’t hide. She had seen what no one else knew, the true nature of the wall. If she did not wake, no one would know what she had discovered, and the wrong would continue. The Ancients did not hide their shadows, they learned from both their darkness and their light.

Njeri opened her eyes and spoke her name.

© 2010 by Caroline M. Yoachim. Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Caroline M. Yoachim has written over a hundred short stories. She is a Hugo and three-time Nebula Award finalist, and her fiction has been translated into several languages and reprinted in multiple best-of anthologies, including twice in Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. Her debut short story collection Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World & Other Stories came out with Fairwood Press in 2016. For more about Caroline, check out her website at carolineyoachim.com.

Travelling into Nothing

An Owomoyela | 6630 words

She was offered the comfort of a drug-induced apathy. She refused.

The cell where she waited to die was, in true Erhat fashion, humane. Really, it was no worse than the room she had rented when she’d first arrived on the station, except for the hard lock on the door. She still had the same music at her fingertips, the same narrative media, the same computerized games of skill or strategy or wit or pure abnegation. All she lacked was freedom.

And a future.

Fuck.

She’d taken to pacing. Four steps wide, seven deep, over and over again until the door chimed—ahead of schedule—and her body seized up in panic, her breath vanished, and her hands fisted of their own accord.

But the voice which came through was . . . curiously non-final.“Kiu Alee. Do you consent to receive a visitor?”

She hesitated a moment, staring at the door. As her heartrate slowed, she said, “Yes”—more from morbid curiosity than anything else. After a moment, she added, “I didn’t know I was allowed visitors.”

The door slid open.

The man on the other side, flanked by a guard whose presence seemed almost cursory, was much taller than anyone in the local Erhat population—much taller than her, as well. Over two meters, at an estimate; he looked taller, with the long black robes that fell in a line down his body. His limbs were long and thin, like articulator arms on a dock, and his movements were fluid, but still hesitant. He had to duck his head to come in, and when he did, he stood there like an abstract statue, head tilted, eyes unfocused, ear turned her way.

Blind. Kiu blinked, moving slightly; true to her suspicion, his head turned to keep his ear angled toward her. Why someone would choose—with the number of augments and prosthetics available—to remain deprived of such a primary sense—

Of course, though, the same could be said about her, and everyone like her. She had no augments to increase her awareness of electromagnetic fields; no augments to expand her visual spectrum. That was her choice. It was every bit as much a choice as this man’s probably was.

And the network of filaments laced through her brain like capillaries didn’t even tie into the social web of the station, the system, the entire Erhat cultural organization. That had made her suspect here, long before she’d murdered someone.

“Kiu Alee,” he said. His accent was strange, all rounded vowels and soft consonants, with an undertone of resignation. “I am Tarsul. You are a long way from home. Do you really intend to die here? I can give you a chance to live.”

Kiu jerked back. “Me?” she said. “Why? For what?”

“Because you have an artificial neural framework,” he said, and her surprise fell again. Of course—her augmented brain, her implanted-in-vitro augmentation, the neural scaffolding too integrated and expansive for any post-maturation implant to match. That made her special. This man arrived because she had a technology he needed; beyond that, he probably didn’t give a whit about her.

And yet, she still wanted to live. What was a little indignity: If her life was only worth anything because of her brain, it was still better than it being worth nothing, without it.

“I’ve spoken with the authorities,” Tarsul said. “They’ve agreed to release you if you never return to their territories.” And why not—no further resource cost to house her, to destroy her body, to update the judicial records any further. And the Erhat government cared very little for any problems faced by those outside its borders. “This suits me, as if you agreed to come with me, you could not return, in any case.”

Kiu had already agreed in her mind by the time that he finished talking. Still, for appearances sake, she hardened her voice, and repeated, “And for what?”

“I need you to pilot a ship,” he said.

• • • •

The ship, as it turned out, wasn’t so much a ship. More of an engine rig.

More of an engine rig, burrowed into the side of a wandering planetoid, with access corridors and neural interfaces spidering across the surface.

Tarsul had said very little—in her cell, escorting her through the Erhat station’s corridors, bringing her onto a transport which didn’t look like it belonged in any of the territories she was familiar with. Though the transport, at least, had felt as though it wasn’t completely alien; when they docked at the rig, the transport fit into the docking moors like a foot fitting into a glove, and they descended into smooth black halls, ambient light which seemed to glow from the air itself, a gravity which tugged more lightly than the Erhat station and more strongly than a planetoid of this kind should have merited, and a persistent low hum which modulated and changed in a kind of cadence, almost like distant voices. Kiu regarded it all with mistrust.

Tarsul closed the transport up behind them, fingers fluttering over the airlock console, which murmured back a long sequence of slow melodious notes. At length they petered out, and Tarsul laid his hand flat on the console. It didn’t respond in any way.

“The transport has been disabled,” he said. “Its engines and communications are no longer functional. I can explain where we’re going, if you’d like to know.”

Kiu raised an eyebrow, aware that he wouldn’t be able to see it. He might hear the skepticism in her voice, though. “All right. Tell me.”

He turned back to her, as though he’d expected her not to care—to be so grateful to get out of an execution that she’d sashay off anywhere at all, without a question or a second thought. Too bad; she had plenty of second thoughts. The fact that she had no options didn’t stop her from having second thoughts.

Well, there had been the one option: to die. But she wasn’t so principled that she thought that was an option at all.

“My home,” Tarsul said, “is in the black. Interstellar space. It was built by refugees of the Three Systems’ War.”

Kiu frowned, and searched her memory for the war he named. She had the vague impression of learning about it at some point—some incidental bit of history, consumed more for idle interest than relevance. “Is that ancient history?”

Tarsul hmmed, deep in his throat. It didn’t sound like he was disagreeing, though. “We have a long history,” he said. “A long, very isolated, history. My arcology”—the word he used sounded ancient—“was designed to be impossible to track. Impossible to find. Utterly self-sufficient in every degree. It almost was.”

Kiu had never heard of any permanent settlement outside a star system. Settlements in interplanetary space were uncommon; some of the larger stations might have held their own stellar orbits, like the Agisa Station Network where she’d grown up, but if anyone had asked her prior to this, she’d have said there was nothing of consequence drifting in the interstellar medium. Some ships in transit, maybe some ancient lost exploration vessels, or probes, or unfortunate failures of experimental engines. Not a—an arcology, some kind of station she’d never heard of.

“Why?” she asked. Tarsul looked surprised; maybe he was expecting her to care more about what had gone wrong. She didn’t. “Refugees, yeah, I get it. But you had the materials to build a new station? And you didn’t just . . . go to another system?”

“A cultural complaint,” Tarsul said. “Believe me, if interrogating our history were to do any good . . .”

He let out a long, long breath, and apparently decided not to explain.

“The arcology was meant to be a closed system,” he said. “No resource loss.”

Kiu snorted.

Tarsul inclined his head. “It almost was.”

“So . . . this.” Kiu spread her hand out toward the consoles and the interface bay, indicating by implication the planetoid they were connected to. Tarsul’s head shifted—tracking the sound of rustling sleeves, maybe. “We’re delivering raw materials?”

Tarsul made a soft, affirmative noise. “Though it took me less time to locate this planetoid than to locate a pilot.”

“I’ve never seen this kind of ship before.” Kiu looked again at the composite walls, at the console. “Who made it?”

“A state secret. One which has not been shared with me.” Kiu’s eyes narrowed; Tarsul’s tone cooled. Still, Kiu could recognize some of herself in that tone: a faint undernote of resentment, more well-hidden than she’d ever managed.

Or maybe that was just her imagination, painting commonalities where none were to be found.

“How am I supposed to fly it? I’m not licensed to fly—”

Anything. She had the basic safety certifications for automatic craft in Erhat and Agisa, but that mostly consisted of knowing how to set a distress beacon and fire the maneuvering thrusters if a collision was detected. And she’d never used any of those skills.

“Are you planning on teaching me?”

“The accelerator flies itself,” Tarsul said. “It only needs to be reminded of where to go. As for that, you’ll have a better idea of how to do so than I will.” He brought his hand up, gestured to his own head. “It’s not . . . precisely the same technology as the neural frameworks I’m familiar with. But they seem compatible enough. This is the third time someone has made this journey. Neither of the previous attempts encountered any difficulty.”

Encouraging.

“We can begin, if you’d like,” he said. “After bringing this planetoid out of this system and setting its trajectory, there will be very little to do. The accelerator is well-provisioned, and there’s stasis if you’d prefer it. Perhaps an hour of your effort, and in return, I and my people will make sure you’re accommodated for, in perpetuity.”

Desperation made odd promises, Kiu thought. Lucky for her. “All right,” she said. “Show me what I need to do.”

• • • •

The pilot’s interface was a little alcove, tucked away down a winding corridor studded, irregularly, with doors. No door separated the interface, though; Kiu had to wonder what design sensibilities this place had been made to accommodate.

The alcove was moulded into a kind of recumbent chair, with a webbing of wire connectors and something that looked like a scanner module near the headrest. The module lit up when Kiu approached, and Kiu could feel it ghosting over her augments. She cast a glance at Tarsul, but Tarsul gave no indication that he felt anything, or knew that anything was going on.

“So, no . . .”

Ceremony? Nothing I need to know? Evidently not. Kiu breathed in, and lowered herself into the chair.

She’d used neural interfaces before. This was a different model, but . . . compatible enough, Tarsul had said. She leaned her head back, reached a hand up to take hold of the interface wires, and felt them coiling, responsive, toward the ports on her scalp. A moment of cool intrusion, warming into connection—and then, abruptly, Kiu wasn’t herself any more.

She was—

Much older, hands on the smooth black composite, not for any interface, just to feel the substance of the accelerator. A cold, clear purpose underlaid with urgent anger. Turning her head, a jangle of strange senses moving within her, seeing Tarsul standing beside her, expression sad. Seeing—

Someplace different. Long corridors, not as winding as the accelerator’s. No windows; what few windows graced the arcology’s walls faced the sweep of the Milky Way’s arms edge-on, not the much sparser starfields orthogonal. The space filled with voices. Footsteps. The scent of green growing things. The sound of—

Someplace different. The accelerator, but not a part she’d ever seen. Argumentative tones, not in a language Kiu had ever learned. Her voice—not her own—responding in kind. Kiu—

Kiu snapped her head back.

The accelerator—

—flooded her.

Remembered.

And through it all, existing in clear pinpoint precision, knowledge without history or context, a location—nothing more than the endpoint of vectors and accelerations, no fixed point because it had no fixed referent, or possibly the one fixed point in a universe where everything else, including the engine, was moving in the ordered cacophonic chaos of orbital motion, stellar drift, universal expansion.

As soon as that hit her, she was rolled over into a flood of need—not desire, not yearning, but a compulsion as inexorable as every indrawn breath, as unconsidered as a heartbeat. That was where she needed to go. Somewhere in that was home. Home for this engine rig which had burrowed into the side of a planetoid; home for Tarsul, for some pilot who had come before. Kiu reached, and the whole of space seemed to shudder around her. The accelerator snapped into motion.

And then Kiu came dislocated, like a joint wrenched out of socket, and shoved herself away from the interface. She flew in the low gravity; hit both knees and her forehead and palms on the cold composite of the hall, and then twisted, snarling, her entire sense of self ricocheting against the walls of her skull.

Tarsul was there. His hands hot on her arms, and she twisted in the microgravity, lashing out.

“Calm,” he urged her.

She snarled. Tried to shake him off.

Everything felt wrong in the low gravity. Kiu had lived her entire life in the real gravity of a planet, or the centrifugal gravity of a station—out here, she felt dislodged, disconnected, like her entire life had become illusory when she had become weightless. That only made her angrier.

They have gravity on the arcology, some fragment of memory—not her own—reminded her. Minded her? Could it be a reminder, happening for the first time? Not centrifugal. Experimental?

Like the planetary accelerator she’d just plugged into? Like—

Tarsul’s gloved hands, curling against her sleeves, colder and more rigid than they should have been. A soporific calm beginning to infiltrate her consciousness.

She kicked out, and Tarsul let her go. He floated back toward the opposite wall, head canted.

He wasn’t wearing gloves.

“What,” she pronounced, “the fuck?”

“You’re more equipped to answer that question,” he said. “Did something go wrong?”

Kiu spluttered. She dragged the back of her hand across her mouth, glaring murder at Tarsul. Her hands itched for violence. Worthless drifting piece of debris—dragged me out here to make a fool of me—

“Who were those people? Where was that—those weren’t my memories!”

Tarsul considered that. Then he said, “Ah.”

“Ah?”

“The accelerator gleans memories from each of its pilots,” he said. “I believe it was also intended as some form of . . . archival device, perhaps? As an ancillary function. I was told it was quite pleasant. Reassuring, in a way.”

Kiu spat. “Reassuring?”

“Especially for a history as contentious as ours.”

Kiu didn’t know enough to unpack that. Didn’t know Tarsul enough to interpret it. Still, she could have sworn he looked amused.

And that—

That was too much. The rage closed over her like a fist, like plunging into the water by a sulfur geyser, noxious and hot and filling her lungs. She lunged.

Tarsul’s amusement vanished in an instant. And, fast—too fast, with the kind of rapid-twitch motion that spoke to muscular augments, reflex enhancements, he sidestepped her attack, and put his hand out to catch the back of her neck. In another second he had her forehead against a wall, one of her wrists caught and pressed against the small of her back.

“It’s adaptive to fight when one’s life is at risk,” he said. “You are not under threat. Despite what you may feel. This, particularly, is maladaptive action.”

Humiliation coiled at the pit of her gut. Tarsul was treating her like a child, or like some kind of a toy—pick her up from the cell because she was convenient, right, bring her here and plug her into the engine like she was a spare part, lecture her like she was some idiot. “Let me go,” she warned.

To her surprise, he did. “I like you,” he said. Then, an incredulous noise from Kiu: “My policy is to like all people until I have a reason to dislike them. Because I asked you to join me, I have a duty to . . . situate you. I’d ask you, as a kindness, not to make this job more difficult.”

Kiu spluttered.

“Of course, I knew I took a risk when I found you.” Tarsul turned his back to her, which only made the rage spike higher. “But people with artificial neural networks as advanced as yours tend not to be the kind of people who would leave their homes forever, with very little explanation. You were the culmination of seven years of searching.” He turned his ear back toward her. “I’m curious how you came to be where you were.”

Yeah; most of the people with her kind of augments weren’t sad-sack drifters, weren’t murderous detriments to society. She got that; she was special. “I don’t want to talk about my past,” she growled.

“Of course not. But our pasts influence our futures.” Tarsul rolled one shoulder. “I also have a duty to the arcology. Bringing this planetoid to them ensures their resource security for another thousand years, perhaps. But you, Kiu Alee—”

He turned his whole body back to her, head canted, as though he could pin her with his listening the way someone else might pin her with a gaze.

“I also want to know that I ensure their security by bringing them you.”

• • • •

Kiu avoided Tarsul as much as she could, given the confines of the ship. It wasn’t as difficult as she’d feared; the accelerator sprawled, replete with odd closets and rooms which had been mostly, but not entirely, cleared of detritus. Kiu made a room for herself out of the provisions that Tarsul had, apparently, bought on Erhat: a sleeping cocoon, listening materials on a tablet, a selection of meals, all with their own containment and heating units, so she didn’t have to run the risk of encountering him whenever she wanted food.

She’d refused suspended animation. After the interface, she didn’t relish the thought of going back down into her brain, even if she wouldn’t be conscious to experience it.

Still, after a while—without anything that served to delineate the time, either to a trade standard or a local schedule—she started wondering just how long she could manage. The accelerator’s black walls were depressing and disorienting, like she was both adrift in starless space and confined in a space where the walls were too close. She could reach out and just barely not touch the walls of the room.

So eventually, she started wandering.

It was strange, how easily her body adapted to moving through the gravity of this place. As though her body was also accessing memories that weren’t hers.

And eventually, she encountered Tarsul.

He was at rest, reclining on a little bench which may not have been a bench, in design. His hands were folded on his chest. He wasn’t moving, but he was breathing deep and even; his eyes were open, so he wasn’t sleeping. Kiu paused in the doorway to the little room.

“What are you doing?”

Tarsul tilted his head. “It’s been a long time since I’ve been home,” he said. “It’s strange to realize I’m finally returning.”

Kiu grunted. She let herself in, a few more handspans. Still kept a good distance between herself and Tarsul. “How long?”

Tarsul was silent.

Kiu narrowed her eyes at him, but she kept silent as well. Even so, Tarsul exhaled, sounding like he was disappointed in her. “I’m not sure, exactly.”

“How many times have you made this trip?” Kiu asked.

At that, Tarsul actually looked surprised. He turned so that his whole body was facing her, head canted to one side.

“Me?” he asked. “The last time we sought resources from a star system was over a hundred twenty standard generations ago. How old do you think I am?”

“I remembered you,” Kiu said. “You were there, in the accelerator’s memory.”

Tarsul’s eyebrows knit together. “Two explanations,” he said. “One: your own memories contaminated the accelerator’s stored memory at the same time its contaminated yours. Pieces of your own experience became blended with what you remembered. None of the memories are faithful representations of anyone’s experience. Two: coincidence. Someone on an historical resource-gathering expedition looked like me. Nothing more.”

That would make more sense, she supposed.

Because what was the other explanation? He was over a hundred twenty standard generations old?—whatever that even meant, coming from his colony. Unlikely; the best genetic treatments couldn’t extend life that far. He was cloned, or gengineered? Plausible, but why? She’d met plenty of heavily-gengineered humans, and they were without fail more impressive than Tarsul seemed to be. And if over a hundred generations had passed since that memory, they probably would have improved their gengineering, too. Why reuse the same models?

“You came out here. From your arcology.”

Tarsul nodded, absently.

“How did you—” Not go insane? “Keep busy on the way out?”

“Meditation, mostly,” Tarsul said.

“Really?”

Tarsul spread his hands. “I regarded it as a pilgrimage. I was chosen because I was . . . temperamentally suited to such a long journey. Unfortunately, that was a consideration I didn’t have the luxury to make, for you.”

Kiu made a disparaging noise.

“Maybe you’d prefer to sleep,” Tarsul said. “We can still put you into suspension. I’m told that it’s a dreamless sleep.”

The same way that memory was supposed to be reassuring? Kiu thought. “No. Thank you. I’ll figure something out.”

“Of course,” Tarsul said. “Let me know if I can offer any diversion.”

“I’m not much into meditation,” Kiu said.

Tarsul laughed, briefly. “I’d think not. Even so.”

“Right.”

Kiu lingered for a moment longer, then took herself away down the hall.

And occupied herself for some short span before folding, and admitting that stasis might be a more comfortable way of traveling by far.

• • • •

Tarsul was right about this, at least—the sleep was dreamless.

She had no conception of the passage of time when consciousness infiltrated her mind again, arriving in a fog of sleepy confusion. She came to not quite knowing where she was; shivering very badly. Entirely psychosomatic, she’d been told, but she didn’t believe it.

Tarsul was at the console beside her stasis bay, an inscrutable series of tones informing him of something. Kiu’s arm ached, faintly, where an IV had gone in. “We’re there?” she asked—but the apprehension of entering a new world, a strange station and culture, didn’t have a chance to develop.

“We’re off-course,” Tarsul said. Maybe it was her imagination, but he sounded tired. “Something must have gone wrong with the calculations.”

Kiu pushed herself out of the bay, and caught herself against the wall. It felt strangely warm against her palm. “I thought you said the accelerator handled all the actual calculations.”

“With some form of input, some guidance, from the pilot,” Tarsul said. “I don’t pretend to understand the intricacies. But it has never failed, before.”

And with that, a new apprehension rose in Kiu’s chest. “What’s that mean?” Don’t ask me to, don’t ask me to—

“It means we’re traveling into nothingness,” Tarsul said. “Unless you can correct the course. The accelerator can correct itself, I’m led to believe, even at these speeds.”

The apprehension roiled into full-blown fear. “You want me to plug back into that thing.”

“Unless the thought of drifting forever appeals to you.” Tarsul turned his ear toward the hall. “Though ‘forever,’ in our case, is bounded by the finite amount of supplies we have on board.”

Slow deaths, then. Set against the immediate threat of all those voices, all those images, blooming up in Kiu’s mind. Her heart sped.

As though he could hear that, Tarsul turned back toward her. “It can wait. A few hours will hardly make a difference.”

Except that it would be a few hours more of sitting and dreading. Kiu grit her teeth. “No. I’ll go now.” Go under threat, but then this entire voyage had been under threat. That was nothing new.

She went back to the interface. Plugged herself in. Tensed her shoulders, tensed her hands, and all sensation of shoulders and hands and body dissolved.

Into—

A little planetoid was nothing. She stood at the helm of a planet, now—no atmosphere to shear off, but thrust turned it oblate. Their progress was slower. Not, however, slow. They could put together most of a system this way—

Or simply flee. Another time, another planetoid, another pilot, staring down at his gloved hands. Memories already coursing through his brain, which Kiu felt at one remove. The whole black body of the accelerator representing a theft as well as an escape. Looking up, to meet the eyes of an engineer who had no idea how to work any but its most basic functions, an entire body of knowledge left behind. Saying—

The tall man again, the one who looked like Tarsul, saying, No, it’s futile. In the long run, the arcology will die. Of isolation. Of indolence. Of attrition. Saying, the prudent choice is to return to a star, and all the resources it offers. Not to continue out here, in the black.

Saying, I’ll do my best for you, but I won’t do anything beyond that.

Kiu didn’t even remember the snap of the course correction; the driving need to go home. She snapped back into herself like a line under tension, shaking, with her hands in fists. And Tarsul, standing there, head cocked, as though he could hear the rage pouring off her. As though he’d neglected one of the traditional senses for some fleet of senses she had no knowledge of.

I won’t do anything. So very like Tarsul, that.

She could have killed him, there.

Could have. That was a proven fact—and she’d thought, for the most part, that killers were people unlike her; people who didn’t know what direction rationality lay in when it was pointed out to them, people whose brains were fried by some accident of genetics or chemical interest or brainwash mis-socialization. Not people like her, who got angry, yeah, but knew where the line was. And yet.

And yet.

There in no particular Erhat corridor, with no particular history of confrontation, in a bad half-second on a bad day in a bad string of days, some Erhat boy no older than her had looked at her and his face had twisted, the universal human expression of disgust, and he’d sent some social impulse off with an ostentatious tilt of his head. Something that had caused his networked friend down the hall to turn, and look at Kiu, and laugh, and Kiu, who’d been through too many homes already and knew, knew that she was still a piece of foreign debris in this one but would have liked to go a day without being reminded of the fact—had taught a lesson with a small stylus, just tapered enough to enter through human muscle and skin, given enough force.

Nothing said I belong; I’m valuable, I’m worthwhile than a staggering act of antisocial tantrum, huh. Even she knew that had been stupid.

It had stopped his friend from laughing, though. At the time, she hadn’t seen past that—not one second, not one thought, not one millimeter.

Tarsul, now, had his eyes unfocused—they were always unfocused—but it seemed as though he was looking far afield. All the way out to his arcology, full of people whose skin was no thicker than that young man in the corridor. They could solve the problem of resource collection in the interstellar nothingness, but maybe they couldn’t solve the problem of her.

“Kiu,” Tarsul said. His tone made resentment march up her spine.

What are you going to do? she could have asked. I’m the only one who can pilot this ship. I’m the only way your stupid arcology will have the material to keep breathing, keep eating, keep the lights on. You need me.

To the exact extent that he needed this expedition to return successfully. And just what extent was that?

Was he the person in the accelerator’s archived memory?

He let out a long breath, here and now. “Maybe you should sleep again.”

“I don’t want to sleep.” She didn’t want to stay awake, either. She wanted to crawl out of her skin. Get in a fight. Hurt someone.

Tarsul sighed again, and said, “I see.”

“What are you going to do with me?” Kiu demanded. She realized, as she said it, how her breath sounded—ragged, rough, like she was looking for a fight. She was looking for a fight. She knew where she stood, when her fists hit flesh. “I’m bringing you home.” I’m doing my best.

I won’t do anything beyond that.

“I’ve yet to decide,” Tarsul said. Like nothing, like this was easy.

Kiu jerked up from the interface chair.

Tarsul stepped back, and then turned, and walked away.

• • • •

Kiu ran the halls, as best she could. Tried to burn off the anger. It worked as badly as it ever had.

Between footfalls, between corners, she tried to think of options.

They were frustratingly few. She didn’t know how to fix the accelerator so it would listen to her; she didn’t know how to fix herself. So, maybe Tarsul would decide he was better off with her dead. She could strike first—she thought she’d be good at that—but if she killed Tarsul, what would she do? Show up at his arcology without him and expect them to let her in? They sounded like class-A xenophobes; Kiu didn’t find the idea likely.

What else? Pilot the planetoid somewhere else? The accelerator alone would sell to just about any shipyard or research consortium for more than Kiu would need, but it seemed to have a mind of its own. Kiu had no idea how Tarsul had gotten it out to the Erhat system in the first place; maybe it was easier without a planetoid attached, but she couldn’t even get it to go where it wanted to go. So that was out.

Which left . . . not much. Starve to death slowly as the provisions ran out.

She punched a wall. It didn’t help.

In time, as though it had a gravity all its own, she went back to the interface.

She stood staring at it for a good, long time. The source of all her problems, this thing—or, at least, that was a tempting excuse. Much better than all her problems coming from her, or from genetics, or from ontogenic accident. If it caused her problems, maybe it could damn well fix them.

Of course, she couldn’t just hit it until it agreed.

It and its memory, of people and things and places that all seemed to have so much more import than her haphazard little flight, her haphazard little life. All those people, coming into her brain and washing over her, more real to her than she was.

Then it struck her.

If this thing was meant to archive, then fine, it could archive her. Maybe she wasn’t fit to live. But she’d still be remembered by someone. Something.

The thought appealed to her. Before she made a conscious choice, her body was already moving back to the seat.

Bad idea. Yes, well, probably, but she wasn’t much use at having good ones. She growled to herself as she fit the connectors back against her scalp, but she’d decided; she was committed.

She activated the interface, and memory became the air around her.

Or—maybe not memory. Maybe just—

A sense of place, so strong as to be overwhelming. The corridors of the accelerator, but more present and real than they had been as she stood in them. These flooded her awareness, denying distraction, constructing themselves in her mind.

And in her mind, the man who looked like Tarsul materialized as though she’d simply forgotten that he’d been standing there.

But Kiu knew where she was. She didn’t dissolve into it. Instead, she steeled herself, and spoke, with something that wasn’t her voice:

“Who are you?”

Kiu Alee, the apparition said. It didn’t sound like Tarsul; not entirely. Or maybe she just didn’t know him well enough to catch this tone. What an absolutely useless question.

She had no sense of her body, here. She couldn’t lash out. She couldn’t feel her chest tighten, her breath draw in, her jaw and hands clench. It was freeing, in a way. It was also a little like death.

“Okay, then.” She couldn’t take a deep breath. Couldn’t relax her muscles. And yet, she could still feel anger, like a sensation in a phantom limb. “Here’s one: Why can’t I fly this thing right?”

Much more useful. Unfortunately, much more complicated. The not-Tarsul turned eyes on her: blank, flat, and still piercing. You are not entirely similar to pilots in the past.

No lip to curl. No teeth to grit, as she considered saying, No, I’m one of those accidents that happens from time to time. What a waste of resources; what a waste of implants. If the Agisa medics could have pulled the filaments out of her brain and left them salvageable in any meaningful way, they probably would have.

Instead, she found herself here.

But it is an opportunity to learn, the apparition said. I appreciate the chance to analyze your augments. And to analyze you. Of the two, you are more interesting.

Slow realization crept through her. “You’re not a memory,” she said. “Are you?”

You aren’t accessing the archived memories, not-Tarsul responded. I understand the interface controls are erratic on your side, as well. Still, you chose how this interface was calibrated.

“You’re the engine,” Kiu said. “You’re the ship.”

An acceptable explanation.

And that—all the questions she could ask, like who made you or where did you come from, vanished under the tide of annoyance. “You know where you’re going,” Kiu said. “Clearly, you have some kind of intelligence. Why can’t you just fly yourself home?”

Calculations, it said, but Kiu thought there was a coyness to the answer. A slight tinge of lie. Organic processors handle some calculations better.

“If you needed organic processing, your builders could have grown a neural web on a substrate.”

Before she could finish the thought, she was answered—Well, just so. And once a human is connected, why not keep a piece for analysis?

Kiu jerked.

And then she dove, back down toward her body, coming back to the surface of her consciousness with her hands on the connectors. But then the quick-trigger affront died back, just enough to let her close her eyes again, search for the connection.

“You’re copying my neuron structure? Culling it? Replicating it?” Even in Agisa, that wouldn’t have been possible. But moving a planetoid wouldn’t be possible, either. Nor would moving anything but information at this ridiculous speed.

Not as you suspect it, the accelerator responded. Your neuron structure, even with its augments, is not deterministic as to your experiential reality. I expand myself. But if you connected looking for immortality, pilot, all you’ll receive is approximation. Still, this is valuable to me. Whether or not it is valuable to you hardly matters.

She could have laughed. “Story of my life, isn’t it?”

Well, it said. Keep coming back. So far as the story of your life goes, it will matter here more than anywhere.

That didn’t sound like something Kiu was meant to understand. She moved past it. “If you study my augments, will you course correct? Is that what you need?”

No, the accelerator said. That, I’d do for my own interest.

“Wonderful. Great.” This thing’s intelligence was entirely unhelpful. “Can you just tell me why you won’t go home?”

Kiu Alee, the accelerator said. Why won’t you let me?

• • • •

Kiu worked her body as hard as she could, after disconnecting. Made circuits of the halls, pushed and pulled against fixed points, did stretches and fast motions until she was gasping air. It bled off some of the boiling energy, if not all of it.

She came to Tarsul in the console room, a far-flung little space full of screens which he disregarded. She was almost too exhausted for rage, mostly just too cynical for anything. Tarsul tilted his head to acknowledge her entry.

“We are still not on course,” he said. He sounded resigned. “I admit, I’m surprised. I don’t know of any pilot who . . . experienced this much difficulty.”

“I’m special,” Kiu said, voice heavy. “My brain doesn’t work right. Ace choice in pilots, though.”

Tarsul turned to better regard her. His face, in that three-quarters turn, looked drawn and pensive. Kiu could almost hear the retort on his tongue: I had no choice.

Yeah, well. Seemed to be a common complaint, here.

Kiu glared at him for a while, and then softened, despite herself. Raw deal for him; surrounded by all this wonder, and he had a murderer with a broken brain on one side, a starving arcology so hidebound they needed a planet brought to them on the other. And hour after hour, he just kept doing what was in front of him to do.

Kiu felt a stabbing moment of powerlessness, of the attendant rage. She fought it back down.

“I can try again,” she said. “One more course correction, right? No harm in trying.”

“No harm,” Tarsul agreed. Kiu wondered if, behind that easy agreement, he was already writing her off.

“Yeah,” she said, and went back down the hall. After a moment, Tarsul followed her.

Maybe she’d go into the connection and not come out. Maybe she’d let Tarsul sedate her and let the accelerator mine her brain and learn her augments and maybe she would learn the command that would set their course correctly. Maybe that was the option left to her.

What had Tarsul said? It’s adaptive to fight when one’s life is at risk. Well, throwing a punch wouldn’t save her, so maybe she should stop trying to throw the first punch. Maybe she should find something to pre-empt the violence that waited on the other side of every heartbeat. Maybe this was it.

“I think I can do this,” she lied.

“I’m heartened,” Tarsul said.

Maybe it was Kiu’s imagination, but he sounded like he had as little faith in her as she did.

No matter.

She went back to the interface. Lowered herself into the chair.

Tarsul tilted his head at her. “You seem different,” he said. His voice was curious. Maybe a shade wary.

I don’t know if I’ve given up on life or had a breakthrough, Kiu didn’t say. Maybe a breakdown. She grunted, vaguely, in reply.

“Are you well?” Tarsul asked.

“Fine. I’m always fine.”

She reached for the interface wires, and pulled them down toward her head.

Tarsul was hesitating, as though he had something he wasn’t sure he should say. Kiu paused with her hands on the wires, and raised an eyebrow she knew he couldn’t see.

Whatever internal line of thought had occupied Tarsul wended its way to a close. “I wish you luck,” he said.

“Huh,” Kiu responded.

Then she attached the connectors, breathed out, and opened up, and surrendered herself to going home.

© 2016 by An Owomoyela. Originally published in Bridging Infinity, edited by Jonathan Strahan. 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.

Frontier ABCs: The Life and Times of Charity Smith, Schoolteacher

Seanan McGuire | 4780 words

A IS FOR AMMUNITION

There are no banks to rob in this painted doll of a dustbowl fantasy town; the money is all bits and bytes stored in a computer vault no human hands can open, whether they belong to banker or bandit. But there are other forms of thievery to be practiced by the quick and the clever, and Cherry is both, when she sees call to be. So when word goes out on the down-low that the Mulrian gang is planning a heist and needs bullets to get them to the finish line, Cherry’s one of the first to the cattle call, her guns low and easy on her hips, her hair braided back like an admonition against untidiness. They’re surprised to see her—aren’t they always, when she shows up in places like this?—but they’re willing enough to let her on the crew once they’ve seen what she can do.

She doesn’t brag much. Doesn’t talk much either, outside of a classroom or a courtroom. But oh, that little lady in the worn-out britches and the red flannel shirt can shoot like she made a bargain with the God of All Guns. Some folks say as she was a sniper in the last war. There have been wars upon wars since she showed up on the scene, and it’s always “the last war.” No one knows how old she is, no one knows the name of her home world, and no one’s sure when she’s finally going to snap and take out her allies along with her enemies. But they keep taking her on, because she makes the bullets dance to her tune. Could shoot the wings off a fly, the flame off a candle, and the fat off of a hog.

The raid begins at local midnight. Four techslingers, four gunslingers, a pilot, and Cherry herself, all walking into town from different directions, all heading for the places they’re supposed to be. The first shot is fired at two past the hour, an old-fashioned gunpowder bullet smashing through the window of city hall. That’s the signal. The gunslingers commence to shooting up the things they’ve been approved to shoot—mostly foliage and buildings and the police bots that come swinging down the sidewalks like they stand a chance against flesh and lead and practice—and the techslingers slide their clever wires into the datastream, bleeding off billions in less time than it takes for Cherry to reload.

That’s her, up on the roof of the library, stretched flat with her scope circling her eye like a wedding ring. Every shot she takes is true, and she takes a lot of them. Nobody dies, but there’s enough damaged as to take the edge off. Then the bell rings in her ear, and she rolls away from the edge of the roof, vanishing into the shadows. Fun’s over.

Tip to tail, they took six minutes to bleed the beast, leaving shattered glass and frightened townies behind like a calling card. Cherry will check her bank balance later and find a healthy payoff from an uncle she doesn’t have, on an outworld that may or may not exist. It doesn’t matter to her. She’s worked off a little of her aggression here, in the shadows and the dust, and that leaves her head clear enough for the real work to begin.

C IS FOR COVER STORY

“Now, can anyone tell me the origins of the human race? Where did we begin?” The one-room schoolhouse is ringed with windows, letting in so much light from outside that the overheads don’t need to be turned on for most of the year. By the time the weather turns sour, the schoolhouse solars will have fed enough into the local grid that they won’t have to pay a penny for the power they use. There’s value in self-sufficiency.

The kids are a surly bunch, growling and glaring as they squat at their desks like so many infuriated mushrooms. These are the children of asteroid miners, farmers, and artisans, not rich enough to go to the fine boarding schools on Earth or Io, but not poor enough to be restricted to home schooling and play dates. They get the bulk of their lessons on their personalized terminals, but they’re here for the social contact with their peers, to learn how to get along and how to form connections that will serve them for the rest of their lives. There are fourteen teachers working this part of the solar system, and Miss Cherry is a newcomer here, arriving at the start of the term. They still don’t trust her. They still don’t know whether they should.

She leans back against her desk, resting her weight against her hands, and smiles winningly at them. They do not smile back at her. She’s hard to measure with the eye, a wisp of a thing in a blue dress printed with white daisies, her long dark hair hanging loose and sometimes getting in her eyes when she gets excited and begins waving her hands around. They’re generally good at telling someone’s age by the way they move, these children of the regen generation—when your grandfather can look like your little brother if he finds the scratch, you learn to read a body for the years it’s seen—but Cherry is a book of riddles, one moment as open as a kindie, the next as closed-off as a three-time regen. Her face puts her in her early twenties, by far the most popular age with women trying to survive in the outer moons.

“Anyone?” she asks, and there is a sharp, sweet disappointment in her tone, like she can’t believe they wouldn’t know the answer to such a simple question. “I suppose I’ll have to recommend that all your consoles be set to remedial human history for the rest of the term, then. I hate to do it—”

“So don’t!” shouts a voice from the back of the room.

Cherry’s head snaps up, and those sweet and easy eyes turn suddenly cold, the eyes of a predator searching for its prey. “Who said that?” she asks, scanning the crowd.

They’ve been in this schoolhouse a lot longer than she has; every child in the class knows how to hunker down and look like butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths. They shift and look away, avoiding her gaze.

“You.” Her finger stabs out like an accusation. “Why not?”

Her target, Timothy Fulton, squirms, but only a little. He doesn’t bother denying that he was the one who spoke: She’s got him, fair and square. Instead, he shrugs and says, “Because we’ve been over all the remedial stuff. We don’t want to do it again.”

“Well, then, you can spare yourself and your classmates a lot of boring scutwork by being a hero and answering my question.” She isn’t smiling. This is the first time since she arrived at the start of the month that she hasn’t been smiling. “What was the origin of the human race?”

“Earth, ma’am. Humanity began on Earth.”

“Very good. When did we move on to bigger and brighter things?”

“The Twenty-Second Century, ma’am, after we figured out how to adapt ourselves to other planets, and how to adapt other planets to ourselves.”

Miss Cherry nods encouragingly. “Very good. What was the first great war after colonization? Anyone?”

Ermine Dale has never been able to sit by while other children were praised and she was not. She puts up her hand, waiting only for Miss Cherry to point at her before blurting, “It was over what makes a human, ma’am. Whether Jovians and Neptuneans were still people, given all the modifications they’d gone through.”

“That’s right.” Cherry pushes herself away from her desk and walks around it to the chalkboard, an archaic piece of set dressing that nonetheless seems to help students learn and retain information. In a bold hand, she writes the number “10,” and circles it before she turns back to the class and says, “This is the average number of years between wars since humanity stretched beyond a single planet. This is how long we have to rest, recover, and learn to do better. That’s what I’m here for.”

“To rest?” asks Timothy, and his confusion is the class’s confusion.

Miss Cherry smiles. “No. I’m here to teach you to do better.”

I IS FOR INEVITABILITY

She’s been here a full season, eight local months stretching and blending together on this farmer’s paradise of a Jovian moon. Ganymede has taken well to terraforming, and Earth’s crops have taken well to Ganymede. Half the moons of Jupiter get their food from here, and that makes it a bright and glittering target in the nighttime sky. When the next war comes—and there’s always a next war—she expects the sides to fight mercilessly to own the sky’s breadbasket.

The children have accepted her. They bring her apples and icefruit from the fields, and some of them have started to shyly tell her what they want to be when they grow up. Someday most of them will be farmers, but some of them may be explorers, or diplomats, or poets, if they get the chance to strengthen their roots on this good soil until the time comes for them to bloom. She likes these pauses maybe best of all. They remind her that the human race has a purpose beyond blowing itself to cinders against the stars. “We can be something more than fireworks, if we’re willing to put the work in,” that was what her long-dead lover told her once, when they were lying naked to the unseeing eye of Jupiter on the barren, rocky soil of this selfsame moon, barely cloaked then in its thin envelope of atmosphere, still an experiment on the verge of going eternally wrong. “We can be anything.”

That wasn’t true then and it isn’t true now, but oh, weren’t they pretty words?

The fact that she’s thinking of him at all isn’t a good sign. Means she’s getting restless, and when she gets restless, she either needs to move on or find something that can bleed off a little of that energy. So she sends out a quiet query to her contacts, lets them know that she might be available for a little pick-up work if the price is right and the location is far enough from Ganymede. Maybe something out-system. Summer break is coming soon, and her kids will be needed in the fields. Easy then for a schoolteacher to slip away on errands of her own. As long as she makes it back before the apples come in, she’ll be fine.

She’s still teaching her classes and waiting for a job to present itself when the choice is taken away from her. Choices are like that. Some of them exist only for as long as it takes not to make them.

They’re in the middle of a comparative theology lesson when the first shots are fired, big, loud things that boom through the still-thin atmosphere like the world itself is ending. Miss Cherry drops the book she was reading from and bolts for the door. The children are still sitting frozen at their desks, too stunned to react. By the time the book hits the floor, she’s already gone.

Ermine starts to cry.

Then Miss Cherry is back, and there’s a light in her eyes they’ve never seen there before, something wild and cold at the same time, like Io, like the stars. “Get to the cellar!” she shouts. “Now!”

She’s the teacher, and so they obey her, running like rabbits for their bolt hole under the building. It’s not until they hear the lock sliding home behind them that anyone really realizes she hasn’t followed, that she’s still out there.

In the dark, hesitantly, Timothy asks, “Was Miss Cherry holding a gun?”

No one’s really sure. They hold each other close and listen to the distant, terribly close sound of gunfire.

K IS FOR KILLER

Children are like seeds, only they all look exactly the same; there’s no way to look at them and say “this one’s a flower, this one’s a tree, this one’s a strain of tangle-vine designed to break up ore deposits on the moons of Neptune.” All you can do is water them, feed them, give them good soil, and watch how they grow. Be careful what you give them, because it’ll change what comes out the other side. Something that could’ve been a rose may come out all thorns and fury if you plant it wrong.

It wasn’t just one thing that went into growing Charity Smith. No one even agrees on what soil she was first planted in. She was Earth-born, she was a Martian, she was one of the first settlers on Ganymede, she was altered Jovian and then back again after the war started, when she realized that heavy bones and thick skin didn’t suit a sniper. She was an Ionian mermaid, she was an asteroid miner, she was everybody’s daughter and nobody’s wife. No one claimed her, not at the beginning and not after. But we do know this much:

One of the places she put down roots was Titan. Her name’s on the first settler manifest, pretty as you please, writ down proper in her own hand. She came in as an educator, fresh from Mars—and there’s some will say this supports the idea that she was Martian born, while others say she couldn’t have gotten a release from the red planet if she’d been a citizen, with the threat of war so close and them so very much in need of trained instructors. It doesn’t so much matter, because she was just a teacher then, with none of the scars or patches that would come after. Titan was newly terraformed back then, and they needed people like her. People who knew how to work for their keep.

There is one surviving holo of the time that Miss Charity Smith spent as a schoolteacher on Saturn’s largest moon. It shows her in one of the sundresses she still wears these two hundred and fifty years later, her hands clasped in front of her and a smile upon her face as she stands with her students in front of the Titansport schoolhouse. It was just one room, one of the first frontier schools built out past Mars, and she couldn’t look prouder if you paid her. There are twenty-seven children in the shot, all of them looking at the camera with varying expressions of boredom and mistrust. They were the sons and daughters of bankers, miners, and farmers; they had no one to speak for them but their parents and their teacher. They were seeds looking for good soil, and Miss Cherry was their gardener, as wide-eyed and idealistic as they were themselves.

All that changed on the night the ships arrived.

There had been rumbles of war in-system for months. Earth fundamentalists thought the modifications of the Neptune settlers had gone too far; said that the Neptuneans were no longer human, and hence had no claim to their home world’s rich mineral deposits. The Neptuneans didn’t take too kindly to that, and had responded with threats of their own. As for who fired the first shot, well, that’s just one more thing lost to the mists of history, which are fond of obfuscation, but not so fond of being cleared away. Someone struck first. Someone else responded. And before most of the solar system even knew that we were at war, the great ships were flying in search of strategic bases to use in their quest to obliterate the enemy.

Titan was well-situated for a lot of purposes. It was a good refueling station, and a better supply depot, with its farms and its farmers and its ready supply of livestock in both clone and field-grown forms. That was why the ships raced each other there; that was why the first real battle of the Great Earth-Neptune War was fought, not in the safely empty depths of space, but in the sky over Titansport.

It was local winter. All the children were in school, as was one young and frightened schoolteacher who had never tried to defend the things she cared for. She was still a seed herself, in many ways; she was still growing.

We don’t know the full details of what happened on that day. Only one person does, and she’s not talking. Here is what we do know: that the school burned. That the children died. And that Charity Smith walked away, someone else’s rifle in her hands, and all the blood of a generation nurturing her roots.

We made her. We earned her. It’s three hundred years gone from that night, and we’re watering her still. May all the gods of all the worlds that are have mercy on our souls.

M IS FOR MURDER

Everyone has heard the stories, of course; they’re part of the two-bit opera that is the history of the Populated Worlds of the Solar System. No one believes that sort of crap, not really, not until they’ve come skimming through the thin atmosphere of a fresh-terraformed moon and found a woman with dark hair and cold eyes standing on the bell spire of the church with a disruptor rifle in her hands. They’re coming in fast and hot and there isn’t time for course correction, so the order is given: ready, aim, fire. Blow the stupid little gunslinger wannabe back to the dust that spawned her, and prepare for the payday.

Cherry’s been to this rodeo before. If the pilot had been one of hers, he would’ve pulled up, no matter what his captain told him. Her presence is a warning and a promise—“This town is mine,” and “I will end you,” both wrapped up in one denim and flannel package. She’s shown her face. She has no regrets, and she never wants them. She buried her regrets in the soil on Titan. So she pulls the trigger and leaps clear before the ship’s engines can realize what she’s done to them. EMP guns are illegal on all the settled worlds, but so is killing children, so she figures her accounts will balance in the end.

The ship goes down hard in the middle of town. It takes out the church as it descends. It misses the school. That’s all she’s ever cared about. Adults are grown; their seeds are sprouted, and for the most part, they’re past the point where they can change what they’ll become. Children, though, children are still capable of domestication. They can learn from the errors of their past.

Cherry takes her time as she saunters down the street toward the wreckage. Faces appear in windows and doorways, gawking at her, taking note of her face and her place in the community. She’ll have to move on after this. She always does. That’s all right. The kids here are good students, and they’ve learned their lessons well. They’ll grow up a little better than their parents, and when she makes her way back here to teach their grandchildren, some of them may smile at her in the streets, duck their heads and touch their hats, and never say her name out loud.

The hatch of the ship is rocking back and forth when she gets there. She sighs, sets her engine-killer gun aside, and pulls the smaller, more personal revolver from her belt. She’s standing patient as the stone when the hatch creaks open some minutes later, and the face of a green-skinned Ionian appears in the opening.

He pales when he sees her. “You’re supposed to be dead,” he says.

“That makes two of us,” she replies, and pulls her trigger. The gunshot echoes through the town, followed by the sound of windows slamming shut and doors being locked. Curiosity has killed a lot of cats in its day, but it’s left the pioneer folk for the most part alive.

Her gun speaks three more times before the ship is a graveyard. She steps away and scans the skies. There’s never just one. It’s not a battle if you’re shooting at shadows. Finally she sees it, a cloud that moves just a little too quickly, skirting against the wind instead of with it. Cherry’s sigh is a wisp of a thing, heartbroken and tired.

Earth, again. Why must it always start with Earth?

Charity Smith is going home.

N IS FOR NO QUARTER

“Are you sure, Miss Cherry?” The governor’s voice is an electronic sine wave that caresses the whole room with its vibrations; the governor himself is a Jovian, genetically engineered to thrive in the seas of liquid metallic hydrogen that cover the planet’s surface. He was born on Jupiter, and came to Ganymede as a young man, seeking his fortune. He can never go home now. He’s been on this world, in its lighter gravity, for far too long.

His daughter has been in Cherry’s class, born of a surrogate; he has never touched his more Earth-true wife with his bare hands. It was the governor who recognized Cherry’s name and approved her hiring. He knows as well as any how important such gardeners are to a world just getting started.

“They saw me, Mr. Galais, and while I’d be just as happy to go back to my class, you and I both know that’s not the way to keep the peace.” She even sounds a little sorry. She likes this world. She likes these kids. “I’ll need my ship and the pay you promised me. In return, I’ll keep the war from your doorsteps, and I’ll only contact you if I need an employment reference.”

The governor chuckles despite himself. “You’ll have it, rest assured; you’ve done nothing but good here. The children will be devastated.”

“Tell them this is the cost of war. They should know that well enough already, from our lessons; you’ll just be giving a reminder.” Cherry shakes her head. “I have to go, or someone will come looking. Now. My ship?”

“Ready at the port. But tell me, Miss Cherry . . . where will you go? What will you do?”

Cherry smiles. It’s a thin, wistful expression, broken and beaten down by more years than anyone who’s seen it cares to count. “I’m going home. As for what I’ll do when I get there, well . . . I suppose I still have a few lessons left to teach. And some folks clearly haven’t been learning.”

The governor had never considered double-crossing her; there’s looking for a better deal, and then there’s taunting a dog already proven to bite. In his tank of pressurized hydrogen, he shivers and turns, his long fins draping over themselves, and for the first time, he is glad Miss Cherry will be leaving them.

Some things are too dangerous to be allowed to take root for very long.

O IS FOR OUTWARD BOUND

There’s always a moment of heart stopping joy when the pull of gravity lets go and her ship is running free and clear across the open sky. Cherry sits behind the controls, tied to the ship with optical wires and catheters and a dozen other cold connections, and she laughs for the sheer beauty of the images being beamed into her brain by the ship’s exterior sensors. Her hands clutch the controls, and she soars across the brilliant blackness of space like a comet on a collision course with the cradle of mankind: Earth itself, that big blue, green, and brown ball of polluted seas and overpopulated soils that gave birth to the human race. She hates it there, how she hates it there, but sometimes, she has no choice. Sometimes, there is nowhere else to go but home.

After an hour in the air, she punches in the final coordinates and keys up her med systems. It’s time for another rejuve treatment. Wouldn’t do to look anything but her best when she meets the relatives.

Q IS FOR QUESTIONING

Cherry’s ship is small enough to fit through any hole in the security nets, and her autopilot is clever enough to find them, driving her on a clean, traceless route until she reaches the outer edge of Earth’s security net. The auto wakes her then, and she yawns and stretches and activates an ID beacon older than most of what’s left in Known Space. Alarms blare seconds later, in rooms too dark and far away for her to see. Cherry hangs there for a moment, a red bell on the collar of the cat, and then she hits the burners and she’s gone, gone, away across the sky, and their tracers are following, and no one dares to press the button; no one dares to take the first shot. She is a fairy tale, a legend, a lie. She is a schoolteacher, and the daughter of a President, and the girl who gave everything away to grow in poisoned soil. She is a ghost story, and this is her frontier.

When she reckons she’s taunted them long enough she stops, gives their guns the time they need to lock onto her position, and presses the button that will begin broadcasting her words across the heavens. “I thought we talked about this,” she says. “You promised to leave the outworlds alone. You said you were done grabbing for what’s not yours.”

(And somewhere far away, a com jockey turns to his supervisor and asks, “What is she talking about, sir?” There is no answer. The bargain she refers to was struck fifty years ago, and the man who struck it with her has long gone to his grave. But where one side stands, the deal holds. That’s the only honest way of doing business.)

She hangs there in the air, an easy target, and maybe that’s the point; maybe she’s more tired than she lets on. “Well?” she asks. “No response?”

(“We have to say something, sir.”)

“I suppose that means the deal’s off. I suppose that means I’m setting myself against you.”

(“Tell her this.”)

And then the words on her com, not spoken, but burning before her all the same: “We’re sorry, Miss Cherry.”

And Charity smiles.

T IS FOR TEACHER

She doesn’t miss Earth much. The Earth that’s there now isn’t the one she left behind, not by a long shot; it’s been too long, and there are too many bullets and too many bodies between here and there. She made her choices and the people who stayed planetbound made theirs, and regrets have never changed the past. She’s invested her money and her time well since then. Generations have grown up knowing Miss Cherry as the quiet voice of reason, and knowing Charity Smith as a bogeyman used to frighten naughty governments into behaving themselves a little better, at least for a little while.

Six hundred years is a long time to pinch pennies and buy bigger guns. She’s better armed than most planetary governments these days, and she makes sure they know it, even if they don’t believe she’s really who she claims until her ship’s ID blazes on their screens like a warning from a disappointed god. She hasn’t fired as many shots as people say she has. She hasn’t needed to.

Maybe one day they won’t need the firm hand anymore, and she’ll be allowed to go back to the girl she was on Titan, the one who’d never held a gun or killed a man. Maybe one day the last of the poisoned fruit will fall, and all the children of all the worlds will be able to grow up safe and unspoiled. But until that day, she has a job to do, and if it’s not a job that anyone gave her, well. Sometimes it’s the jobs we take for ourselves that matter most of all.

The schoolhouse is not new; the desks are worn and marked with the initials of those who came before. But the chalkboard is clean and gleaming black, as dark as the hair of the woman who stands in front of the class. “Hello, Io,” she says, and smiles. “My name’s Miss Cherry. I think we’re going to be good friends. Now, who here can tell me the origins of the human race?”

© 2013 by Seanan McGuire. Originally published in Raygun Chronicles, edited by Bryan Thomas Schmidt. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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

They Go Bump

David Barr Kirtley | 5960 words

Ball placed his feet carefully. Walking on rough terrain was treacherous when you couldn’t see your feet—or your legs, for that matter, or any part of yourself. All he could see was the uneven ground, the shady stones outlined with sharp sunlight, drifting eerily beneath him.

His boot caught and twisted, and he pitched forward, falling and smacking his elbows rough against the ground.

From somewhere up on the hilltop, Cataldo’s voice laughed. That voice—smooth and measured, with just a hint of sharpness. Ball had never paid much attention to voices before, but now voices were all he had.

Cataldo’s shouted, “Was that you, Ball? Again?”

Ball groped on the ground for his rifle. He felt it, grasped it, and slung it over his shoulder. He clambered to his feet, and wavered there a few moments, unsteady.

Cataldo’s voice again: “How many times is that now? Twelve?”

“Eleven.” Ball groaned, stretched, and looked around. “Where are you?”

“By the rock.”

Ball sighed. The rock. There was nothing but rocks, nothing but rolling expanses of rocks and more rocks, stretching to the horizon in every direction. The orange sky was littered with rocks, too, rocky moons. “Which rock?”

“The big, triangular one.”

Ball squinted up the hill.

“See the tall peak?” Cataldo’s voice prompted. “Follow the gully down. There’s a patch of boulders, and then at the edge of those there’s this big, triangular—”

“All right, I see it.” Ball took a deep breath. “I’m coming.”

He scrambled over the boulders and picked his way carefully among smaller stones. He tried to picture Cataldo’s face—slick black hair, long, narrow face, oversized nose. Ball hadn’t seen that face all day. Now there was just the voice. “Okay, I’m here,” he breathed, finally.

The empty spot of nothingness that was Cataldo said, “Where’s Sweezy?”

“I don’t know.” Ball shook his head, though he realized Cataldo couldn’t see it anyway. “He hasn’t said anything all day. I’ve tried talking to him.”

Cataldo groaned. “Sweezy! Hey, Sweezy! Where are you?”

The vast plains of boulders were stony and silent. There was no answer.

“He might have fallen behind,” Ball said. “Maybe he got lost, or hurt his ankle.”

“He’s out there. Goddamnit, Sweezy! Sound off.”

Finally, a plaintive voice, from far down in the rockslide, called out, “I’m here. What?”

Sweezy. His voice tended to waver as he spoke. It always seemed tired and prickly, that voice. Ball shouted, “We’re checking to make sure you’re still with us.”

“Just go,” Sweezy’s voice said. “I can take care of myself.”

Cataldo grunted in disgust, and said to Ball, “Come on. Let’s catch up with the others.”

Ball turned wearily, and moved to follow. He walked in the direction he thought Cataldo had gone.

Invisible soldiers. Ball chuckled tiredly. Invisible soldiers on an important mission, invisible soldiers with invisible feet.

He tripped again, and fell.

• • • •

The week before, Ball had been safe, tucked far underground in the winding, humid, steel-rimmed tunnels of Fort Deep. He had been sitting on a hard bench outside Captain Schemmer’s office.

They were giving Ball a mission; he wondered if he was going to die. Cataldo had come and gone already, but Sweezy was still in there. Ball could hear the voices through the door.

Sweezy’s voice, prickly and desperate: “Why me? I’m a good soldier. You know I’m a good soldier. I train all the time. I study all the intel, hard. I don’t deserve—”

The captain’s voice, female, too low and gruff to hear the words.

Then Sweezy again, “But—”

Then the captain, and so on.

Finally, the door opened and Sweezy emerged. He was skinny, with a huge, lumpy head, and big eyes rimmed with darkness.

“Hey Sweezy,” Ball said softly.

Sweezy, sweaty and pale, nodded and walked on past.

Captain Schemmer called, “Private Ball.”

Ball stood and entered. The office was spartan: one desk and two chairs, one chair for the captain, one for Ball. The walls were made of hewn boulder and plate steel. Schemmer wasn’t made of those things, but she could have been.

Ball sat down. “Nice to finally meet you, Captain.”

Schemmer nodded. “You’ve been picked for an important mission. Earth Army is conducting field tests of the new phased camouflage.” She stared at him levelly. “You’ve seen the reports?”

“Yes, sir.”

He hadn’t bothered, actually, but he’d heard of the camouflage. “That stuff the Kraven-Hish mercenaries use.” He suppressed a shudder. “That makes them invisible.”

“We’ve developed our own. You’re going to test it under battlefield conditions.”

Ball blinked. “Battlefield, sir?”

“You’re going to walk across the planet surface, from Hatch E to Hatch A.”

He caught his breath. For months, orbital assault platforms had circled high overhead in the orange-dust sky. They swept over the horizon and launched missile attacks against anything that moved on the surface. “But the orbitals—”

“Won’t see you,” Schemmer said. “Not if the camouflage works. Just like they don’t see the Kraven-Hish mercenaries.”

Ball stared at the floor.

“We’ve done tests,” Schemmer said. “The camouflage has passed every one. You should be pretty safe. But we need to know whether this stuff holds up under real conditions. We need to send some people outside with it, for a week or more.”

“Me?” Ball glanced back over his shoulder. “And Sweezy?”

“And some others. Yes.”

So they needed a couple guys, some guys who could walk. And maybe these guys would get nuked. So they picked the most useless guys here.

Himself. Cataldo. Sweezy.

Goddammit.

“Yes, Captain,” Ball said.

• • • •

The six suits were sheer, gray and filmy, like a trout’s eye. The elbows, knees, and boots were thickly padded. Air tanks and rifles, all that same dull color, hung from the shoulders. The rifles were linked to the suit by thin cords.

“The cord’s so you don’t lose the rifle,” one of the technicians said. “It’ll be invisible, too, once you power up.”

Six suits. Ball glanced around the room.

Private Dimon, rat-faced and sleazy, was over in the corner sucking up to Cataldo. So Dimon was in.

Plus Cataldo.

Sweezy.

And Ball himself made four. Two more.

A calm, friendly voice said, “Ball.”

He turned. Private Reice, young, soft-spoken and good-natured, stood grinning.

“Damn,” Ball said, “They got you, too.”

Reice nodded. “Me.” He glanced toward the door. “And the corporal, too, it looks like.”

Corporal Tennet, tall and brave, walked into the room.

“He probably volunteered,” Ball said, quietly.

The corporal cleared his throat. “All right, everyone. Suit up.”

The technicians helped Ball into one of the suits. The material clung tight around his biceps and thighs. A foggy, translucent mask covered his face.

One of the technicians said, “There are buttons inside the material on the left wrist. You can feel them.”

Ball ran his fingers down his arms. He felt four knobby bumps.

“Punch in your code,” said another technician, demonstrating on the corporal, “like this.”

Light flashed, bright as a signal flare. The technician backed away from the glow. The corporal was gone.

Ball waited, tense, through a long stretch of silence.

Then the corporal’s voice: “I can’t see my hand.”

Reice strained forward, staring hard. He whispered, “Holy shit.”

The corporal’s voice again, “I can’t see my feet either.”

“Move slowly,” the technician advised. “It takes some getting used to.”

Ball heard the soft clomp of the corporal’s first footstep. They heard his voice, chuckling. “Everyone power up.”

Light flashed out all over. Ball shielded his eyes against the glare, and he punched the code on his wrist, and then—

He saw the tip of his nose, and the dark interior rim of his helmet. He looked down and down. There was nothing there.

Vertigo struck him. He was falling—falling forward—he jerked upright. He dropped back a few paces, and closed his eyes. “How do you power it down?”

“You don’t,” a technician said sharply, “or you’ll die.”

“Punch the code in reverse,” said another.

Ball opened his eyes. He waved his invisible hand in front of his face. He ran his invisible fingers over his invisible wrist, over the knobby buttons. In the end, he decided not to mess with them.

Sweezy’s voice said, “How do they know these things are going to work?”

“They don’t,” Cataldo’s voice said nastily. “That’s what we’re for.”

Sweezy said, “I think they ought to—”

There was a sudden crash, and a desk rolled across the room, scattering pipes and wires. From somewhere down on the floor, Sweezy groaned.

Cataldo said, “Stop screwing around.”

“Someone pushed me,” Sweezy protested. There were the scrapes and thumps of him climbing to his feet. “It was you. You pushed me.”

“I didn’t push anybody,” Cataldo said.

Dimon’s voice added, “You probably tripped.”

“It was you then,” Sweezy said. “I never trip. Never. I train all the time. I . . .”

His voice trailed away as the corporal cut him off: “All right, form up and move out. Hatch E. Let’s go.”

“We’re going outside?” Ball said, half to himself. “Now?”

“What do you want, Ball?” Cataldo challenged. “A mission briefing on how to walk?”

Dimon snickered.

They marched out into the hall. A group of heavy-helmeted military police was waiting, their cold eyes tracing blankly over the spot where Ball stood. Ball gave them the finger. No response.

The police led the way down long rock and steel tunnels, then herded the squad through a great oval airlock and out into the cavern beyond. The air was thin here. Enormous steel pipes stretched up to the ceiling, up to a gigantic metal plate. The underside of the plate read: HATCH E.

Ball flinched as the great hatch creaked and shuddered and began to descend—slow, massive and ponderous. It sank and crunched against the floor.

The corporal said, “Move.”

Ball scurried forward and climbed awkwardly up the steep stone façade. A voice cursed—Ball couldn’t tell whose. The platform rose, higher and higher. They came out into the open sky and the hatch clanked solidly into place beneath them.

Ball stared. The vista was wide and empty. There was nothing to see here. Not even himself.

“Everybody sound off,” the corporal said.

Ball said, “I’m right next to you.” They had no radios, no locator beacons. Orbitals could track signals like that.

“I’m over here,” said Cataldo.

Next to him, Dimon. “Yeah. Me too.”

“I’m here,” said Reice.

There was a long pause.

The corporal prompted, “Sweezy?”

Sweezy’s voice came finally, almost too soft to hear, “I’m with you.”

The corporal sighed. “All right. Hatch A is northeast of here. Northeast is that way, between those two rocks.”

Ball squinted toward the horizon. Two large rocks sat heavy and still.

The corporal said, “Move out.”

There were scraping footstep sounds as the squad began to march.

Dimon said, “We’re going to die.”

“Maybe,” the corporal replied. “The first orbital comes up over the horizon in forty-three minutes.” He paused. “Then we’ll know.”

Ball traced his gaze over the horizon in a wide circle. “Nine days out here? Even if the orbitals don’t get us, a pack of Kraven-Hish mercenaries will.”

Cataldo said, “Maybe you haven’t noticed, Ball, but we’re invisible. They can’t see us.”

“We can’t see them either,” Ball countered.

“Exactly,” the corporal cut in. “They can’t see us. We can’t see them. No one can see anyone. So relax. And keep walking.”

Ball pulled the rifle off his shoulder and hefted it experimentally. Damned impossible, he decided, trying to aim a gun you couldn’t even see. He sighed.

Again, Dimon’s voice. “We’re going to die.”

Dimon’s voice. It came from somewhere ahead of Ball, and it drifted past, and out away over the hills.

• • • •

Forty-three minutes passed. The first of the orbitals came over the horizon. Ball imagined he could see it up there, a bright spot shining white against the orange sky. It looked like death.

The corporal said, “It’s time.”

Ball waited, not sure if he was breathing. He waited for a glint of metal in the sky, for a tactical nuclear assault.

Ten minutes passed.

“The orbital’s overhead,” the corporal announced. “It can’t see us.”

Ball breathed out and out. He slumped down low in his suit. Dimon’s voice started to laugh, a little crazily.

“Keep walking,” the corporal said.

The sound of scattered footsteps picked up again.

“And now—” Ball took a deep breath “—now we can start worrying about Kraven-Hish mercenaries.”

“Give it a rest, Ball,” Cataldo said. “You’re bringing down my morale.”

“They might be around,” Ball argued. “A pack of them.”

“They might not,” Cataldo said.

“Who knows where they are?” Reice said. “Who knows where the hell they might be? We don’t even know what they look like.”

“They don’t look like anything,” Cataldo answered, irritated. “They’re invisible.”

Reice said, “You know what I mean.”

No one had ever gotten a picture of the Kraven-Hish; they were always invisible. You couldn’t get a picture, even if a soldier killed one, and some guys were pretty sure they had.

Ball glanced around. Imagine the whole squad died out here, who would ever find them? They’d rot. Then the suits would rot. The suits would go visible in rotted patches, nothing left of the bodies inside.

Dimon said, “You know what I heard? I heard they’ve got pictures of the Kraven-Hish. Intel has pictures. They don’t want to show us.”

Reice said, “Why would they do that?”

“They don’t want to frighten off new recruits,” Dimon said. “That’s how scary these things are. That’s what I heard.”

“That’s stupid,” Cataldo said.

“That’s what I heard,” Dimon repeated. “That’s all.”

• • • •

Ball hadn’t tripped in over six hours. He forced himself to grin.

From somewhere behind him, Cataldo’s voice shouted, “Sweezy!”

Ball turned. “Not again.” He took a few steps back toward Cataldo.

“Sweezy! Damn it, Sweezy. Just say something.”

The rocky wastes were silent.

“I swear, Sweezy,” Cataldo warned. “I swear this is the last time. Sound off.”

They waited, and waited. There was no answer.

Ball imagined Sweezy’s face—tired and petulant, forehead scrunched, eyes staring at his feet, ignoring them.

“All right,” Cataldo called finally. “All right, if that’s how you want it. I hope you break your neck.”

Ball sighed.

“Let’s go,” Cataldo told him.

They walked up over the next rise. The scattered voices of the others were faint in the valley below. It took an hour of walking to catch up.

Those voices, louder now, drifted toward them.

The corporal’s voice: “Reice. You take point for a while. I’m going to check on the others.”

“Yes, sir,” Reice’s voice said.

The corporal’s voice, “You know the way?”

“To Hatch A? Yes, sir.”

“Good.”

Ball walked a few hundred yards. From right beside him the corporal’s voice came: “Who’s there?”

“Ball, sir,” Ball said. “And Cataldo.”

“Anything to report?”

Ball wondered if Cataldo would report on Sweezy, but Cataldo just said, with a trace of disgust, “No, sir. Nothing at all.”

• • • •

Night fell. The dusty sky turned from orange to brown to muddy black. The cratered asteroid moons shone lovely and red. Ball lay curled up in his soft suit on the hard ground and kept his rifle close. With his fingers, he traced the invisible cord that connected the rifle to his shoulder.

Reice was resting somewhere nearby, and Dimon was somewhere down the hill. Ball wasn’t sure about the corporal, and Sweezy hadn’t spoken since that morning. No one seemed to miss him.

Dimon’s voice burst out, “Cataldo. Get off, it’s not funny. I’m trying to sleep.”

Cataldo’s voice answered, from far down the hill. “What? I’m over here.”

There was a sudden sound, a sharp, breaking sound, like a branch snapping. But there were no branches out here, nothing here to be broken except their bones. Ball said quickly, “What was that?”

“I thought I felt something,” Dimon’s voice said. There was a short pause. “Never mind. It was nothing.”

“What was that sound?” Ball pressed. “That cracking sound?”

“What sound?” Dimon’s voice said.

“I heard it, too,” Reice’s voice said.

Dimon’s voice said, “I didn’t hear anything.”

Ball rolled up onto his knees, pushed the butt of his rifle back into his shoulder, and pointed the barrel out toward the darkness.

Cataldo’s voice called, “You’re hearing things, Ball.”

“I heard it, too,” Reice insisted.

“Heard what?” Cataldo’s voice said.

“I don’t know,” Reice said. “Kind of a . . . I don’t know.”

Dimon’s voice chuckled.

Cataldo’s voice joined in. “Right.”

Ball knelt there on the rocks. He stared up at the asteroids. They glowed deep and red, like the blood of Earth Army soldiers killed by—

Kraven-Hish mercenaries.

Dozens of them could hide out here. Hundreds. Lurking invisible among the stones. They were trained to fight unseen. They could get close to a person, kill a person. Silently.

Or almost silently.

They could kill a person, maybe mimic his voice, and then no one would ever know.

“Let’s get some sleep,” Dimon’s voice said.

Ball shuddered. It was Dimon’s voice. But was it Dimon?

A Kraven-Hish mercenary crouched deadly in the darkness there, settled over Dimon’s invisible corpse. Maybe.

Ball lay still. His ears strained for any sound, but there were no more sounds. And no more sleep.

• • • •

Dawn burned orange and bright.

“Corporal,” Ball said. “I’m afraid.”

“We’re all afraid, Ball,” the corporal’s voice replied.

“I heard something last night, sir. A strange noise. I think I heard Private Dimon die.”

“I saw Dimon this morning,”

Ball didn’t say anything. The corporal waited.

“Sir.” Ball heard a strained quality creep into his own voice. “No one’s seen Dimon since Fort Deep. All we hear is a voice. Voices can be imitated.”

“You think our squad’s been infiltrated? Dimon’s voice replaced by—”

Ball lowered his voice. “By Kraven-Hish mercenaries. Sir, I don’t know.”

“Just Dimon?”

Ball paused. “And maybe Cataldo, I don’t know.”

“And maybe me.”

Ball sighed. “It’s possible, sir.”

“But you’re still telling me?”

“I have to tell someone,” Ball said. “If they’ve gotten you, well, then we’re all dead anyway. It’s worth the risk.”

“That’s good thinking, Ball.” There was a brief pause. “But you’re overreacting. You thought you heard a noise. Maybe it was real, maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was nothing. I wouldn’t blame anyone for starting to hear things out here.”

“Reice heard it, too.”

There was a pause. The corporal’s voice called out, “Private Reice.”

Ball didn’t hear his approach, but a few moments later, Reice’s voice was there. “Sir.”

The corporal’s voice said, “You heard a noise last night?”

“No,” Reice’s voice said. “I mean, I thought maybe I did, sir, after Ball said it. But it was just my imagination. You know what it’s like here at night. The—”

“Yes,” said the corporal’s voice. “Thank you, private.”

Ball waited a while.

“Sir,” he pleaded softly. “Please.”

“Your mind’s playing tricks on you, that’s all. You know how I’m sure?”

“How?”

The corporal’s voice sighed. “A pack of Kraven-Hish mercenaries wouldn’t bother to infiltrate us. They’d just wipe us out. We couldn’t stop them.”

That was true, Ball acknowledged.

“You take point for a while,” the corporal’s voice said. “It’ll give you something else to think about.”

“Yes, sir,” Ball said.

• • • •

Days passed slowly, and Ball heard sounds:

Slithering. Slavering. Leathery skin. Loose flesh. Popping joints and hisses and groans and grumbles. And moans, most of all. Soft, predatory moans. Sounds like Kraven-Hish mercenaries make.

“Corporal,” he begged. “Please, we have to do something. I can hear it. Oh God, I can hear them.”

“It’s your imagination, Ball,” said the corporal’s steady voice. “Remember what I said before.”

That night, Ball lay awake again, his thoughts exhausted and mad.

Kraven-Hish mercenaries. Ball was leading the way to Hatch A and they were following close behind. When the hatch opened, the things would burst unseen and unexpected into those safe stone tunnels.

He didn’t tell the corporal these thoughts.

He was afraid. That his squad was being replaced, one by one. That the corporal was dead. That a Kraven-Hish mercenary stood there, somewhere back there, mouthing the corporal’s words.

He was very afraid.

• • • •

He tried to find Reice, and talk to him, away from the corporal. It was hard. Ball didn’t know where anyone was anymore. The footsteps had become soft—almost ghostly, insubstantial—and Reice and the corporal seemed to group close together, always.

“Reice,” Ball said. “You heard it, that night. I know you did.”

Reice’s voice said, “Ball, I didn’t hear anything. Really.”

An uneasy feeling spread over Ball. What if this wasn’t really Reice? Ball said, “Back at Fort Deep, you—”

“Ball, I’m tired, all right? We might not ever make it back. No one wants to talk about old business right now.”

That was a lie, Ball was sure of it. So Reice was gone, too, probably.

Ball felt very alone. Reice and the corporal, and Dimon. All dead, replaced by Kraven-Hish mercenaries, monsters that spoke with the voices of friends.

After that, those three voices always grouped close. Maybe they were plotting something.

And Sweezy? Sweezy hadn’t spoken in days. No one had mentioned him. Maybe he had gotten separated, or twisted an ankle. Ball wished he could believe that—Sweezy, lying back in the rocks, lost or injured, but alive. But Sweezy was gone. Weak, whiny Sweezy, always straggling behind, always alone. He had been the first to die.

Cataldo? Ball wasn’t sure about him.

“Listen,” Ball told Cataldo. “There are Kraven-Hish mercenaries, close around us. I hear sounds. You hear it, too. I know you do.”

“Leave me alone, Ball,” Cataldo’s voice said. “You’re creeping everybody out.”

“You hear them.”

“People imagine things. Things that aren’t there, in a place like this.”

Ball said, “I have an idea.”

Cataldo’s voice answered quickly, “No.”

“We can power down our suits. Just for a moment. For a second. The last orbital went down over the horizon eighty minutes ago. The next one won’t be up for half an hour. We can see who we really are.”

“I’m not risking it,” Cataldo’s voice said. “Because you think you heard something? That’s insane.”

“You heard it, too.”

“Forget it.”

“I’ll do it, then.” Ball’s heart beat fast. “I’ll power down my suit. Then you’ll see it’s safe. Then maybe you’ll do it, too.”

Ball stared up into the sky, straight up, to where an orbital attack platform floated, bristling dark with missile silos, waiting to attack, if he was wrong about this. His fingers played over the buttons on his wrist.

“Don’t,” Cataldo’s voice growled. “Don’t even think about it. You wait until the rest of us reach minimum safe distance. Then do whatever the hell you want with yourself, I don’t care. But not here, Ball. Not now. You’ve got no right.” Cataldo grumbled and walked away; his voice faded slowly.

Was that really Cataldo? Hard to say.

Ball kept his invisible rifle gripped tight in his sweaty, invisible fingers.

• • • •

Sometimes, lying on the jagged ground at night, he wondered if any of them had ever been real—Cataldo, Dimon, the corporal—he couldn’t exactly picture their faces anymore. Maybe they had never had faces. Maybe they had only ever been voices. Voices in his head.

Other times, marching exhausted in the sun, Ball thought about fighting them. He hefted his rifle, which was heavy, huge, and worthless. He could have aimed it, maybe, if he could’ve seen his targets. Without targets . . .

Useless. He might get off a dozen shots, and most would miss. Then they would close in on him—Cataldo, Dimon, Reice, the corporal—and however many more were out there.

He could run, slip away in the night, sprint ahead to Fort Deep. But the base was still three days off, and the squad was already marching as fast as Ball could manage. Or he could hide, wrapped up safe in his unseeable suit, hide among the mounds and rocky hills. He had six days worth of air. The others would notice he was gone and they’d come after him, maybe overtake him, or maybe they would go on to Fort Deep and make it theirs. Then Ball would perish lonely among the crags.

So he kept walking, walking and talking, and he didn’t mention Kraven-Hish mercenaries anymore, even though he could hear them.

He kept glancing back over his shoulder, though there was nothing there, not even his shoulder. Why hadn’t they killed him yet? Maybe they needed someone to lead them to Hatch A, or maybe not. It couldn’t last, they’d get him sometime, maybe this afternoon.

Maybe during this footstep—this next tired, tortured footstep—this one. But then that footstep was over, and he was still alive. Maybe the next one then.

The sun sank low and the sky turned dark.

Or maybe tonight.

The squad made camp, and Ball settled down on the ground beneath a rocky overhang, to rest and brood. Footsteps came toward him across the hillside.

“Ball!” Cataldo’s voice whispered. “Ball, where are you?”

“I’m here,” Ball said, softly.

“We’re in trouble. Oh God, we’re in trouble. You were right about them.” Cataldo’s voice paused. “The corporal was asking me things today: How close are we to the hatch? What security do I think will meet us? Weird stuff like that. The corporal, he knows all that better than us.” Cataldo’s voice got lower. “And you were right, I think. I can hear it sometimes. Those sounds.”

Was it some sort of trick? Ball sat still in the darkness.

“What are we going to do?” Cataldo’s voice said. “What can we do?”

“I don’t know. Let me think.”

Ball thought hard, but said nothing. Finally, Cataldo’s voice grunted. “I’m going to get the hell out of here.” His footsteps stumbled off down the hillside.

The corporal’s voice said, “Reice. Dimon. Sound off.”

Ball tensed, and waited.

“I’m over here,” called Reice’s voice, and Dimon, too, “Here.”

Again, Ball had that unsettling feeling, that feeling they were all off together—Dimon, Reice, the corporal—grouped close together, plotting.

“Ball,” the corporal’s voice shouted. “Where are you?”

Ball didn’t answer. The silence was heavy. Finally, he murmured, “Up here.”

“Where?”

“Under the rock,” Ball said. “Under the ledge.”

“Okay,” The corporal’s voice said. “Cataldo?”

Ball waited.

Again the corporal’s voice: “Cataldo? Sound off.”

Long minutes passed.

Then a sound from somewhere down the hill, a sound like a spine splintering. A sound like a voice—Cataldo’s voice—coughing blood and gurgling it and choking on it. A sound like Cataldo dying. It cut off abruptly.

The corporal’s voice called out once more, “Cataldo.”

A few moments later, Cataldo’s voice answered, calmly, “I’m here.”

Ball shut his eyes very tight and tried not to move, or breathe. He wanted to be more invisible—so invisible that no one would ever see him again, or ever hurt him. He wanted to be so invisible that he wasn’t even there anymore.

He waited half an hour, then stood, slowly. He crept across smooth stones to a narrow crevice 100 meters down the hillside. He lay down there, curled up tight. He wanted to fall asleep and wake again alive. He wanted for the horrible Kraven-Hish mercenaries not to find his sleeping spot. In the morning, he awoke.

His rifle was gone.

• • • •

Ball traced the invisible cord very, very carefully. It was broken halfway down. He felt around on the ground. He crawled back and forth. He checked again slowly, methodically, inch-by-inch. He wished he could believe it was an accident; that the cord had worn down and the rifle had fallen away sometime in the night. But he knew it hadn’t.

The whole squad started marching again and Ball trudged on, defeated. Tears rose up behind his eyes and spilled down his face and he was too tired to stop them. He was still alive and he didn’t know why and the others were all dead.

Reice had been decent and good. He had never done anything to deserve this.

The corporal had been brave, and had tried so hard.

Dimon had been a shit. But what did that matter, out here?

Cataldo had been too angry, too mean. But Cataldo had kept checking on Sweezy, when no one else bothered. That was something.

And Sweezy. Ball had almost forgotten him. Sweezy had been harmless. It wasn’t fair.

Nearby, Cataldo’s voice said, “Ball. I want to talk to you. About last night.”

“You’re not Cataldo,” Ball said slowly, evenly. “Kill me, if you want, but don’t lie. Not anymore.”

Cataldo’s voice laughed. “Jesus, Ball. Take it easy.”

“I heard Cataldo die,” Ball said. “I heard it. You killed him.”

“I tripped, Ball. It startled me, and I must have gasped, or something. That’s what you heard.”

Ball didn’t answer.

Cataldo’s voice chuckled. “Come on, Ball. I just tripped. Haven’t you ever tripped before?”

“No,” Ball said. “Never.”

And he waited.

And then Cataldo’s voice said: “Well, good for you. I trip sometimes, all right?”

Ball felt weak and dizzy. He closed his eyes and red shapes swam in the darkness behind his eyelids. A long, low moan rose up from somewhere inside him and he couldn’t stop it.

He said, “I tripped twelve times the first day and Cataldo was there. He laughed at me. You’re not him. Don’t lie, don’t say anything. I won’t believe you.”

Cataldo’s voice sighed a long, hard sigh.

Ball said, “Get away from me. Get away or I’ll shoot. Even if you are Cataldo, I’ll shoot you.”

Cataldo’s voice said, “Shoot me. Without a rifle.”

“I have a rifle,” Ball lied.

“No,” Cataldo’s voice said. “I’ve got yours. I’m pointing it at you. I could pull the trigger, if you don’t believe me.”

Ball backed slowly away. The invisible cord that had held his rifle waved loose from his shoulder. He reached for the buttons on his wrist. “I’ll power down my suit,” he warned. “I’ll do it, and the orbital will kill us all.”

“Go ahead.” Cataldo’s voice was unconcerned. “Power down. It’ll make it easy to shoot you.” He paused. “The last orbital went down an hour ago.”

Ball tried to figure if that was true. It was. He waited, he said softly, “You need me to lead you to the hatch.”

“No,” Cataldo’s voice said. “Cataldo told us how to get there. Yesterday, before he died.”

Then it was over. “Why didn’t you kill me? Last night. Whenever.”

It was the corporal’s voice that answered. “That’s a good question, Ball.” There was a pause. “Why don’t cats kill the mice they catch, right away?”

Ball shuddered. That voice, the corporal’s—that proud voice. It wasn’t right that it should say such a thing.

“For fun, Ball,” Dimon’s voice burst out. “That’s the answer. For fun.”

Ball waited. They were all together there, all grouped close, arrayed against him.

Reice’s voice assured him, “Don’t worry though, you won’t be killed.”

Ball tried to picture them: a pack of Kraven-Hish mercenaries, standing deadly before him. He couldn’t do it. It was too awful. He couldn’t even imagine it. “What do you want?”

A new voice came, a terrible voice. It was low, hissing and rasping, sickening. It was groaning and gurgling—it filled Ball’s ears—the most horrible, wretched, sound. It was so wicked, and so horribly cunning, and it said in a voice that seemed barely living: “I want you to see . . .”

Ball waited, tense. Finally, he said, “What?”

“My face . . .” said the thing. “I want you to see my face. Then I’ll let you go . . .”

Ball saw nightmares in his mind. A dozen filmy tongues, and puckered tentacles, and rows of fleshy spines. A bulging skull and rotted cords of muscle, claws and soft innards everywhere. Or rows and rows of teeth-stuffed gums, an oozing carapace, a mad cavern of cerebrum and heavy vein. Or eyes that bulged wild, off of tubes like eel bodies.

“I’m worse . . .” said the thing. “Whatever you dream I am, I’m worse. But you want to live. I’m powering down my suit . . .”

Ball closed his eyes.

Four gunshots fired in the stillness.

Then a long wait. Darkness, eyes squeezed.

Then Sweezy’s voice, “Ball, where are you? Let’s go.”

Ball kept his eyes closed. “Sweezy?”

“Come on,” Sweezy’s voice said. “Move.”

Ball struggled to understand. “You were gone—”

“I wasn’t. I was around. Quiet.”

Ball choked, a relieved sob. “And you got them? The Kraven-Hish mercenaries? You got them all?”

“I got it,” Sweezy’s voice said. “The one. It was all of them—Dimon, Cataldo, Reice, the corporal—all their voices.”

“One?”

“A solitary hunter. Like a cat. Intel was right.”

Ball began to open one eye.

“Don’t look at it,” Sweezy’s voice warned, wavering, uneven. “Just turn around, and let’s go.”

Ball turned away, and opened his eyes.

“Walk,” Sweezy’s voice said. “Until we’re over the rise. Don’t look back.”

They walked. Sweezy’s voice didn’t say anything for a while. When it came, it was very weak, “I wish I hadn’t seen it, Ball. Oh God.” It sounded like he was crying. “I don’t ever want to dream again.”

Hard stones drifted by beneath Ball and he counted paces to keep himself from thinking too much. They went over one rise, and then another. He halted then, and collapsed on the ground. Neither of them said anything for a while.

“I tried to tell the corporal,” Ball said finally, softly. “I tried to tell him. He wouldn’t listen.”

“The corporal was dead the second day. That wasn’t him you were talking to.”

Ball hunched over and held his invisible head in his invisible hands.

“Always take out the leader first,” Sweezy’s voice said. “Basic strategy.”

“The second day?” Ball sat unbelieving. “You knew the second day and you didn’t say anything?”

“It would’ve known about me, that monster, if I had said anything. Then I’d be dead. And so would you.”

“But Reice,” he said. “The corporal—”

“I saved you.” Sweezy’s voice was sharp. “I could’ve left you there, or started shooting blind, but I didn’t. I waited for my chance and I saved us both.”

Ball lay back against the ground and stared up into the orange-dust sky.

“I’m a good soldier,” Sweezy’s voice said. “I always said I was.”

• • • •

They walked two more days and halted at the top of a high cliff. Safety waited near, beneath Hatch A, just out of sight beyond the darkening horizon. Night fell. Ball lay awake and thought horrible thoughts.

Like—maybe the monster had known about Sweezy, after all.

Ball hadn’t seen the thing’s body, crumpled and lifeless. He had closed his eyes. Maybe there had never been a body, maybe that thing was still alive.

Maybe it was . . .

Ball slowly turned his eyes upon the empty spot where Sweezy lay sleeping.

“Sweezy!” he hissed. “Sweezy, wake up.”

There was silence. Finally, Sweezy’s voice said, “What?”

Ball trembled, he couldn’t help it. “That is you, isn’t it, Sweezy?” His voice was pleading, desperate. “It is really you? It just occurred to me that—”

“Yes, it’s me,” Sweezy’s voice assured him. “Go back to sleep, Ball. Of course it’s me.”

Ball took a deep breath. Yes.

He rolled over and closed his eyes. He tried to relax.

Of course it was Sweezy, he tried to tell himself.

Of course it was.

© 2001by David Barr Kirtley. Originally published in Empire of Dreams and Miracles, edited by Orson Scott Card and Keith Olexa. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David Barr Kirtley 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, Other Worlds Than These, and Fantasy: The Best of the Year, and on podcasts such as Escape Pod and Pseudopod. He’s also the host of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast, for which he’s interviewed folks such as George R. R. Martin, Richard Dawkins, Paul Krugman, and Simon Pegg. He lives in New York.

Abandonware

Genevieve Valentine | 5080 words

The deer came back over and over to places it didn’t understand. The deer hated the lamp at the end of the pier. The deer wanted to die.

• • • •

Some kids do that—they imprint on empty objects, they give them stories and opinions and a will, until they feel half-inhabited even to grownups, who have to pretend that they care how Chrissy’s blanket feels about things for so long that one day when Chrissy’s at school they step on the blanket and apologize.

I did it with anything, when I was young; my toys were always in the middle of some intense plot that nobody outside could understand. It was because nobody felt for them like I did, my mother said, like it was something to be proud of. But understanding and empathy are different. I could do one without the other.

Rhodey the Rhodesian Rhinoceros had been hurt by terrible things Pioneer Barbie had said in fits of anger. I knew how deeply her words cut him, but I had no feelings about it; it was just how things were.

Pioneer Barbie was acutely aware that I had wanted an American Girl doll for my birthday and she was the much cheaper compromise my parents had agreed on without asking me. If they’d had the money she would be Kirsten and not an impostor, and if they’d just asked me which Barbie I liked then she’d be Medieval Barbie, who had a velvet dress and ruled a kingdom and was unconcerned with what the girls at school said about girls who brought Pioneer Barbie in for show and tell instead of a real American Girl.

Rhodey had gotten caught in the tangle of Pioneer Barbie’s low self-esteem, and it wasn’t fair, but nothing is really fair; Pioneer Barbie and I knew that already, and if Rhodey didn’t, then it was time he learned.

Don’t think I hated Rhodey. I never did. I gave him life and feelings, the same as the rest. It’s just that cruelty was something I saw no reason to spare them just because they only had me to turn to.

He outlasted her, though. It’s hard to play with Pioneer Barbie after you learn about what the pioneers did, and one day she had a black evening gown and her hair was brushed out of the little Western ringlets into a ponytail held by a clip that kept popping open, and her name was Kass because that was the name of the girl on East Side High who wore black.

Kass got along better with Rhodey than Pioneer Barbie had. (She was easier to talk to; Kass hadn’t committed any atrocities on her way across the plains.) Rhodey fell in love with her for a while, but she told him he was just distracting her from her career. They had a fight about that, too. Some kids are real suckers for pretending something has life when it doesn’t.

Anyway, the deer.

• • • •

I didn’t know anything about Vanished and Gone. When I first saw the deer I thought I’d been hacked.

I found the Sparks Investigations forum eventually, once I’d watched the feed for a few hundred hours and caught enough background dialogue about killing private investigator and ex-detective Emerson Sparks.

What I had wasn’t the game; this had been made inside it, somehow, but that was all. In the game, you have options. You can act. You can stop it. You couldn’t change a thing about Fallow; you couldn’t even pause playback. It was just the deer.

I watched the feed for eight hours that first night, until it was dawn and my eyes hurt too much to keep going. I kept it open on my laptop the next day until I fell asleep. At some point I started taking notes. Not because I liked it; because I was afraid.

• • • •

Vanished and Gone is set in 1956 LA, and you’re a PI hired to find a missing heiress who ran away with the movie star who turns up dead in the first scene.

The game has so many variables that it’s hard to trace what happens after that. You can choose Emerson Sparks’ gender before you play, and the gender of your ex-lover; you can choose if the dead movie star was a man or a woman. The heiress is non-negotiable.

You can choose whether you trust the cops, or the old rich guy who hired you to find his daughter, or your informant, or your ex-lover the nightclub musician who saw the heiress on the night in question and will get killed if you cross the wrong people. (If you choose the woman, she sings. The guy plays the trumpet.)

You win the game if you trust the right people, find the heiress, save your lover’s life, and expose the crooked Chief of Police who was trying to rig the mayoral election in favor of the guy who hired you. No one’s ever won.

Players on the forum didn’t think that was as awful as I did. They told each other a true noir had to be unsolvable because that was half the point of the genre—the understanding that the world wins. The other half of the point was apparently to wander around 1956 Los Angeles in a game with so little directive and so much detail that you can, if you want, read the newspapers. There were three dozen screenshots just of newspapers.

But this isn’t a game where time stops. If the heiress is being held hostage by the mob, she’ll die while you’re reading the horse races; the police frame you for it if you take the time to look through the Post. Everything marches forward whether you do something or not.

(Who could stand it, I thought. All those options, and failure at the end of every one.)

The deer appears in the game only once. You can accept an invitation to hunt in the woods outside town with old Mr. Harrington, the rich guy who hired you, and the deer leads you to a T-strap pump in the woods near the highway, if you follow it long enough. If you follow it too long you get shot.

How did the deer do all this, I typed on the forum thread about the hunting trip; I wrote out the link to Fallow when it wouldn’t copy and paste from my window.

The Captcha word was PIONEER.

I never posted it.

• • • •

Nothing makes the deer happy. Not people, not wide spaces, not the woods.

A deer should recognize home. This one can’t. It will charge out of the woods, across the highway (dying three times in a row as cars hit it), wander onto the lawn of some movie mogul who’s having a cocktail party, and pace on the flower beds until you want to scream.

The deer is obscene in artificial places, far enough away from the camera that we see the loneliness of its whole body against stores and beaches and wall-high posters of movies that never existed. It’s the color of a dream, mottled with stars, and neon light looks like it’s pressing too hard. The small dark hooves make no noise on the pavement—no one imagined the deer would ever leave home. The antlers are wide and broad as a pair of reaching hands.

The deer turns toward the camera too much—never quite looking at you, but close enough, like it knows it’s being watched. It doesn’t look around for any other reasons; it hardly cares where it’s going.

“It’s learning to jump!” I wrote once, horrifically excited about pixels negotiating other pixels in a randomized encounter over which I had no control.

It wasn’t learning. It died of starvation because it couldn’t figure out how to jump three feet up a retaining wall. It got up again immediately.

Garden steps. A downhill street. Twice it snapped its neck trying to climb into a mob warehouse, crashing boneless as if the loading platform was a hundred yards off the ground and not six feet.

A mile down the way is grass and trees and quiet. The only things in that warehouse are a Crown Vic that belongs to Big Santini Junior, some suspiciously warm lighting for a warehouse that’s supposed to be hard to find, and people that will hunt you as soon as they see you.

The warehouse is so close to nothing. Open dirt leading to the wilderness. Hills. Trees. Cross the nothing, I think, and have the wisdom to go home.

It falls and dies, the stupid piece of shit.

• • • •

My father bought a summer house in Lake Hammond.

He didn’t take pictures in front of the actual house. He knew better than to put stuff like that in public. His old fuck-up daughter might see his profile and ditch her garbage apartment and hitch a ride to Lake Hammond and break into his house and rearrange Paige’s careful interior design so that every piece of furniture faced the lake.

(Paige would think it was gauche to point everyone at the reason they’d bought a house; I don’t really get being subtle when you’re already as bad at it as my dad and Paige.)

Let’s hope the fault line behaves! the caption read, under a picture of him and Paige standing by the shore. No telling who’d taken it. His other children were playing in the lake; the town was a cluster of dollhouses on the far shore, like he’d built the whole place to celebrate his family. Trees surrounded everything. It looked cool there, like there was a breeze. The sun was glinting off the water, and my father was smiling, and I was a ghost.

There was a link under the picture, labeled Fallow, which I clicked because some people just like to be miserable. I expected a tourism site, a real estate broker. It was the deer.

(I thought I had been hacked. After a few minutes, I thought it was some kind of CGI video with a joke at the end. That was so long ago I still thought the deer ended.)

When I went back a week later, eyes stinging from watching it twenty hours a day, the link was missing, and they weren’t in the photo, Paige and my father and his children. It was just the town, unbroken water, the bright empty sun. I’d closed the window with a shaking hand. Haven’t been back since.

I wish you could save the footage of the deer. It’s important; our memories get so broken.

• • • •

The deer keeps forgetting about cars, about long drops. It never gets more wary of people. Why would you have to, if you’re immortal?

It smashes into the lamp at the pier, though. It will bolt through the dark streets out into the candy lights of the Ferris wheel and the covered arcade, running so fast it’s a blur when it strikes. At first the light was just askew; eventually the pole crumples and the light sizzles out as it hits the water.

(I tried to stop it once—I hit every key I could think of, terrified the electricity would kill it now that the wires were exposed. The deer struck it so hard some of the railing splintered into the water.)

It does so many other things that this might look random, like maybe it’s trying to run to the water and is too stupid to find the beach. But it means to. That run is a straight line—toward something, not away. You wouldn’t know if you weren’t paying attention, but I am.

• • • •

I looked up fallow deer, after I found the feed but before I knew about the game, trying to understand what I was seeing. There really are fallow deer in California. A farmer released some into the wild in the 1940s, and they got a foothold. They’re not meant for it—they look like a fairy tale that got kicked out of home—but I guess they don’t die easy even if they aren’t on your computer, walking out of the sea they just drowned in.

• • • •

My boss calls me one morning, too early for work hours. At first I don’t understand the problem. I’ve been filing my reports; I’ve been filing more, even, since I started pulling twenty-hour days.

When I open the most recent one, it’s notes about the deer, which is my own fault, I guess.

The next one is notes about the deer; the next one is notes about the deer. There are notes about things the deer hasn’t even done. It got into the Observatory, apparently, which seems like a pretty neat trick from something that can’t climb stairs.

Six oranges, the next report starts. It’s all foods. I didn’t know the deer could eat.

• • • •

Only three people on the Sparks Investigations forum ever found Josephine Harrington alive. In one ending, she threw herself in front of her father’s gun so Sparks could escape and warn the mayor of the plot on his life. In the other two, she’d been behind it all the whole time. Sparks died, and she became a movie star. It was too much for Vanished and Gone to make her the mayor, I guess.

It was months before I saw Detective Sparks in Fallow, standing in the alley behind the Gray Derby Club, smoking a cigarette and scraping tears away with one hand. The deer balked at the trench coat and turned around.

I stayed up all night, typing how can it know who that is into a search bar, never pressing enter.

• • • •

If the deer stands underwater too long, it starts to sink into the sediment. Up to the knees. Up to the chest. It dies, probably—drowning over and over—except it doesn’t breathe so it’s hard to tell. Eventually it gives up dying and wanders out; at some point there’s nothing left to do but walk forward.

One night it ran down a woman carrying groceries. Staved her head in. Food went everywhere. (Six oranges.)

Once, an old woman at a bus depot reached out to touch it. It ran all the way to the sea and drowned itself.

It must know. It remembers nothing, but this much it must know. Sometimes it hesitates like it doesn’t want to, but once it walks towards the water it never stops.

• • • •

Things that people in 1956 Los Angeles have said to each other as an invisible deer wanders past them and can’t do a thing about it:

—“Where were you the night Lee Parker died?”

—“If you knew the snake eyes from a full house, you might make the grade—” “How dare you! I’ve lost fortunes in better places than this!”

—“We’re not looking for trouble.” “Then you’d better close your eyes.”

—“You’re boring me, girlie.” “Feeling’s mutual, Detective.”

—“Christine,” once, and I look up and try to go back—it’s a common name, I know that, I know that, but it had sounded so close, like someone had said it directly into the mic, into my ear, and no one was nearby—the deer was wandering derelict houses—had I missed a person half-alive in one of these rotting-out homes, begging for someone who wasn’t coming?

—“Where do you think you’re going?”

• • • •

It’s five a.m. and the deer is walking past the zoo when I think, “I wonder how Rhodey’s doing,” like he’ll have aged. Like he’ll be bigger if I see him on the street, gray at the temples, have a stuffed animal husband and two travel-size kids like the ones hanging underneath him on the zoo display the day I got him.

When my parents divorced, they took me on a beach trip to prove everything was still friendly, even though Mom slept in the bed with me at the motel because it was already important for us to start distancing ourselves from Dad. He looked heartbroken about it, the first couple of nights. Six months later he had remarried.

(That one stuck; those are the kids he still has. He took them on that same beach trip, about ten years back. The pictures went all over his profile; the boardwalk and the gazebo and the sign for the taffy place. I thumbs-upped a couple of them, so I didn’t run any risk of seeming stung. I worried about looking like someone he could hurt.)

I forgot Rhodey at the motel we stayed in overnight on the drive down. When I saw that he was gone, I felt one swift, terrible pang. Then I realized that I would keep feeling swift terrible pangs if I cared every time I left someone I loved, and so I stopped.

My dad could never even remember Rhodey’s name, so he was struggling to look appropriately sorry, but Mom was furious we’d forgotten him, like it was Rhodey’s feelings that would be hurt if we didn’t go back.

(When she was taken to the hospital for what ended up being her last hours, delirious from pain, she asked me to make sure Christine got there. As the EMTs lowered her out of the ambulance, I scrambled out; when she saw me, she grinned and gripped my hand and told me she knew I’d make it, because she’d told that bitch nurse to call me.)

“He’s important,” my mother spat.

My father said, “I thought the trip was what was important,” and I said, “Stuffed animals are stupid.”

My mom looked at me in the rearview mirror. She looked worried a lot that year. I had already put Kass in the sauce pot with two inches of water in it and gotten her to a low parboil that I’d told Mom, when she found me, was a hot tub.

“Chrissy, honey,” she tried, “won’t you miss him?”

But things die when they leave you. As soon as you realize you can do without someone, they die; you never get back that urgency, that lonely needing-something once it’s gone, and I was old enough to understand that.

I looked at my dad in the rearview and said, “Not as much as he thinks I’ll miss him.”

I had a new stuffed animal before we left the Rehoboth Beach Visitor Orientation Center. It was a purple octopus. I named it Divorce. My dad laughed once, a weird little happy bark, like he was reconsidering leaving if I was going to grow up to be funny.

Divorce never had life. When I got home I put it on the shelf next to Kass and never bothered to introduce her. (Kass had her own problems by then; her dress was melted onto her legs.)

It sat where Rhodey used to be, eyes empty, until things at home sounded like I might end up in a new school because of the custody arrangement. Then I took it to the lawyers’ office and tore it limb from limb where the receptionist could see. She called everyone out of the meeting before I started on the head.

I got to stay at my school. Rhodey would have appreciated my foresight, if he’d been there, but I could never have done that to him, so it’s just as well he left when he did.

• • • •

One time, as it’s racing through the woods towards the hermit mansions in the hills, it runs past a wolf.

If I made a game, the wolves would be immortal, too. Downtown would still be neon, and the rich neighborhoods would siphon all the water from the mountains into the soft green lawns that deer died on, and the wolves would invade. Mob casinos and cocktail parties and grocery mothers would fall under their teeth. The game would end when all the people were dead.

Your job could be to warn people, I guess—to keep them alive as long as possible. But that’s no better than Vanished and Gone; I don’t like games it’s impossible to win. It would make more sense if you were the wolves.

I’d keep the deer. It would live in the woods, far away from Los Angeles, and never know that anything was wrong.

• • • •

Josephine Harrington isn’t in love with Lee Parker, movie star.

People on the forums got really heated about it, like it makes a dead movie star matter more. It doesn’t help that Parker was supposed to play honeypot, but sets Josephine free and faces the mob alone. (“The sort of damn fool thing you only do when you’re in love,” Sparks can say over the body. You don’t have to—you can say three things anywhere you go, all of them change the future—but it’s the one that gets you the choice, later, to die for the lounge singer/sax player who thinks you don’t have what it takes to love someone.)

Someone had screenshots of the time they took Mr. Harrington up on the hunting invitation and got inside the house. Josephine had no photos in her room, not even of her dead mother. There was a Photoplay cover of the movie star sitting on her desk, though. The player captioned it Secret Love—PROOF!!!

But that’s not love. That’s something you leave on your desk to let your father know that you know what he’s trying to pull. You have to be careful with fathers; you can never let them think they’ve won.

The thing is, I’ve seen screenshots of Josephine’s body. She’s in slacks. The date was at the Gray Derby—a game that shows you the beads at every throat isn’t going to set up an heiress for a supper club date with Lee Parker and put her in pants by mistake.

When the movie star took her out under false pretenses, Josephine Harrington knew. Josephine Harrington was ready to run.

Sometimes people think you love something when you’re just sending a message; that’s their mistake, not yours.

• • • •

After cancer got Mom, I sold the house and what was inside to pay what it cost her to die. All I kept were the books: classics for when someone came over so it looked like she was in the middle of Persuasion, and the mysteries she kept by the bed, so well-read the covers fell off.

I can walk to the house in ninety minutes. They’ve fixed the cracked pavers that were supposed to be a driveway but just cut into Mom’s tires so she called me from the parkway and made me come change them three separate times. In the window of the room where she lost her mind, there are sheer white curtains now.

Not the room where she died—she died in the hospital, angry about it and not knowing why, a long tail of pain that sucked her memories so that when I told her I was taking her to the hospital she yelled at me (thick-mouthed, exhausted, giving in) to shut up and call Christine.

When I asked why, she’d blinked, burst into tears; she didn’t know. I was relieved. If she’d said Christine would never let this happen, I wouldn’t have known what to do.

I drove behind the ambulance, and didn’t see the deer until I’d already hit it, that endless second between the deer and the crunch of the car buckling, it’s why I needed her car for so long after—

No, wait, that isn’t what happened; I’m a piece of shit but I went with my mother, and I hopped out and pretended I’d just arrived and she was so happy to see me. I went with my mother. I would have gone with my mother.

(Memories are only half-inhabited, anyway; I was with her or I wasn’t, there was a deer that I murdered because I was crying too hard to see, or I sat in an ambulance that smelled like baby wipes and pretended she was still my mother. She’s dead and no memory is going to do anything now. You can only walk forward.

I’m just tired. I’ve been staring at the screen too long.)

• • • •

Los Angeles is huge. The deer runs over and over into the hills, the pier, that fucking empty beach, but the city sprawls out a hundred miles square. There’s the giant observatory it hasn’t even found yet. There has to be more. The deer’s losing its mind.

Not that the deer has a mind; it’s died on two dozen flights of stairs. It’s just that if you’re going to pretend something is random, at some point you have to hit other outcomes. New things. Otherwise it’s like school, when every teacher says partners are randomly chosen but you’re always assigned Travis, who no one else likes because he always feels like he’s looking for something to hit. Not me—that’s why people assigned him to me, I guess, but it was always fine. He was just nervous and hated life. He shot himself senior year.

That’s who called me in the game, I realize. Who said my name so close. Travis.

• • • •

My landlord asks me to move out. Monies owed.

Dad’s house is more than an hour outside town. Too short. I’m never ready to see him with Paige and the kids, happy. But I’ve gotten better at working on him since I was a kid; you can get a flicker of guilt if you pick your moment and say “Mom” or “alone” or “microwave dinner.”

Dinner is chicken and salad that the children help with because Paige thinks it’s important to have them invested in making food so they’ll be adventurous eaters. I’ve forgotten the name of one of the kids and have to wait for Paige to say it. (It’s Chrissy.)

The studio above their garage is very decorated—some of it even looks like stuff my dad picked, not just Paige exploding. Dad paints up there, he says at dinner, like he wants me to be happy he’s doing something beautiful but also like he wants to remind me I’m interrupting.

“That’s great,” I say, “I’ll start looking for new places tonight,” and he sighs like that wasn’t what he meant even as Paige hesitates a second before she says I can stay as long as I need.

The deer’s wandering Hollywood Boulevard when I get back to my room. There are flies everywhere. Strange that you can hear flies and rustling paper but not its footfalls. If you weren’t watching you wouldn’t know the deer was there.

(There’s a hospital somewhere in town. The deer never gets near it; because of Mom, probably.)

• • • •

Every so often, the deer pauses on the train tracks as a whistle sounds far away, as if it wants to die and it’s wondering if that would do it. It’s waited, all night sometimes; the train never comes.

Is that what it’s waiting for? Does it even notice the world? Does it have some memory of Josephine Harrington in the woods outside the Snake Eyes Motel, looking it in the eye as she drops one shoe in the dirt to confuse the cops? If I tapped the screen, would it look me in the eye? If that woman in the bus stop had touched it—pressed her palm to those ribs that never move—would it have known, or would it just be dreaming of the bottom of the sea?

• • • •

The next morning, early, I come down for the spare coffeemaker. I don’t want to be in the family kitchen in the mornings like I’m trying too hard.

Chrissy’s already up, drawing, a Pop-Tart abandoned beside her. When she sees me, she frowns—children should be wary of adults just on principle, but she looks at me the way I used to look at Pioneer Barbie. Smart kid.

“You’re not staying for a long time, right?”

“Nope.”

She nods and goes back to her work. After long enough that silence seems rude, I ask, “What are you drawing?”

She doesn’t look up. “Rhodey,” she says.

• • • •

I throw my stuff into the backseat and start driving, a straight line. When the car breaks down, I live there.

I dream a lot about the deer standing in the ocean until the silt ate it whole.

• • • •

Dad manages to get one last thing in common with Mom. He tells me about the cancer in the winter, in a voicemail it takes me two weeks to listen to. Before I can get my courage up to go back to that house with its other Chrissy and see him, he’s gone.

Paige invites me to the funeral, inside a card that reads: Those who really love us are never really gone, and we can feel them with us our whole life long.

Whatever you think is best, she’s written at the bottom, in a different pen so I would know she just couldn’t leave it alone. I’m sure he’d respect your wishes.

• • • •

The deer’s walking past an amphitheater, when I finally get up the nerve to look at Fallow. It’s twilight; there’s a band rehearsing, the same few bars played over and over, echoing faintly off the empty seats.

When the deer gets to the boardwalk, it pauses. There are still people, even in the almost-dark. It looks unhappy. It tries to climb into one of the vintage beach cabins ass-first; no dice.

“Just tryin’ to keep on, friend,” someone calls, out of sight. He sounds like my father, but the deer doesn’t turn. It stands and looks almost at me, but not quite.

I hope it can’t see me. I don’t want it to try.

It drops onto the beach (dies, gets up). It’s the color of the sand—you barely see it, except for the scoop of antlers. Birds cast shadows across it, and the sunbathers go home, but still it doesn’t move. It’s watching the ocean; the tide is coming in.

The deer is going to go into the water. It should run, it should trample everyone to death rather than go back, but it came here. It already knows.

It moves across the beach without leaving footprints; the water laps closer and closer to the hooves that make no sound.

Eventually it stops. It knows I’m there. At the edge of the water, it hesitates.

Someone behind it is calling my name.

©2018 by Genevieve Valentine.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Genevieve Valentine is the author of the novels Mechanique, The Girls at the Kingfisher Club, Persona, and Icon. She has also written the comics Catwoman for DC and Xena: Warrior Princess for Dynamite. Her nonfiction and criticism has appeared at NPR.org, The Atlantic, LA Review of Books, and the AV Club. Her love of bad movies is evergreen; you can read about it at genevievevalentine.com.

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

Jump

Cadwell Turnbull | 2860 words

Mike and Jessie were walking in the park. The trees high above their heads stretched to touch each other, their leaves letting only the tiniest slivers of light through.

Mike watched the freckles of light spot Jessie’s brown face, her shirt, her arms. He tried to snub them out with his fingers.

It was a long day for them. They’d spent a few hours walking around the park, just talking. About old dreams and new ones, black riots and urban decay, the secrets of their hearts and the mysteries of the universe, the time Mike introduced himself through a mutual friend and his palms were so clammy that Jessie knew immediately how nervous he was.

They always talked a lot. Mike was amazed that they always found something to say. It was a little less than two years, but he thought once grad school was over, he would ask. He thought she’d say yes.

They made another lap around the park. By the time they decided they needed to walk back home—a full forty-five minutes away—they were way too tired to make the journey. They considered a cab, but Mike had a better idea.

“Why don’t we teleport?” he asked.

“What now?” She laughed. She was giving him that smile she gave when he was talking crazy, that would spread across her face, her eyes wide, her eye brows raised in steep arches.

“Hold my hand,” he said, and he didn’t wait. He grabbed her hand himself. “We can do it.”

“What makes you think we can teleport?” she asked.

“I believe,” he said simply.

She laughed at him again. “You’re crazy.”

Mike didn’t know how far he was going to take this. But it was Jessie and he didn’t worry about seeming silly. “Close your eyes and picture home,” he said. “On the count of three, we will jump forward and we will be there.”

He looked at Jessie, and sure enough, she closed her eyes. She was smiling and he wished he could read her thoughts, but that was another power entirely.

“One,” he said. He tightened his grip on her hand. “Two.” He felt a warmth in his stomach, his knees were bent, he was extra aware of the grass beneath his feet. “Three.” He leapt and he felt Jessie leap with him, their bodies synchronized. They were in the air for no more than two seconds and when they landed, their feet hitting the ground at the same time, there wasn’t the familiar soft crunch of grass. There was the hard thump of their feet against pavement. When they opened their eyes, they realized they were home.

• • • •

Jessie looks back on the day often. She remembers how weak her knees felt once they had made the jump; he had to hold her up to keep her from toppling over. She remembers his face, the flashes of abject terror, shock, and then euphoria. And she remembers the warmth in her belly, like she was glowing from the inside.

She remembers her neighbor Greg from 34C, halfway up the stairs to their apartment building when they arrived out of nowhere.

“Oh, I didn’t see you two there,” he said, turning when he heard Mike’s joyous scream. “Everything okay?” He looked from Mike to her to Mike again.

“Holy shit,” Mike said, as if in answer. And then more screams.

Jessie’s sitting on the couch, reliving the moment, her legs pressed under her, an open book in her lap.

Mike walks into the room. “We should try again,” he says.

Jessie glares at him. If Jessie agrees, this will be the twentieth time they’ve tried. They have all been failures.

Mike keeps a calendar where he crosses off the days since it happened. Many markers are spent in the attempt to keep a record; the markers start out strong, with vibrant confident lines, and then they sputter and falter and only the blood-crawling squeak against the paper remains. Mike tries many colors. Blue. Red. Green. Magenta. The ink runs out of all of them. And still no jump.

The first dozen attempts are at the park, trying to find the right spot, wearing the right clothes. Jessie must always be on the right side. They try time of day. It must always be late afternoon. They try the weather. The day must be cool and clear.

Mike recites the exact words to himself. He writes it down. He puts the words next to the calendar on the wall. He remembers Jessie’s words, too. It must all be perfect. They go back to the park and relive the experience word for word. When they do this they sound like play actors reciting lines.

“Why don’t we teleport?” Mike asks.

Jessie rolls her eyes. “What now?” she asks and the laugh is hollow, mocking.

“You’re not trying. You have to really try—”

“Jesus, Mike.”

“—Now we have to start over.”

Soon after that, Jessie refuses to go back to the park. But Mike keeps asking to try in other places. At home. When they go out to restaurants. At the movies. Jessie obliges, but each time her shoulders slump a little lower. She hates it. She hates it so much.

“You’re killing me,” she says. “Why does this matter so much?”

“Why wouldn’t it matter?” Mike says. “What would matter more?”

A day later, he asks her again and she almost throws a book at him, pulling back at the last moment. “Leave it alone, Mike. Can’t you just leave it alone?”

• • • •

Sometimes Mike wonders if he imagined it. But it can’t be. Jessie was there.

He gets so suspicious of the whole thing that he starts to wonder if even Jessie is a figment of his imagination.

When his friend Alex comes over for dinner, Mike tries to confirm his suspicions while Jessie is in the kitchen. “I’m married to a woman about this high, right? Light brown eyes? Dark skin? Can be a little judgy sometimes?” He says the last part a little softer than the rest.

Alex just looks at him.

Mike waits for an answer, the cold doubt creeping up his spine.

“That was a great dinner, J,” Alex says, looking past Mike. Then he looks back at Mike and points at him with his fork. “You fucked up.”

Mike turns and sees his wife. He has no idea how long she’s been standing there. But she makes a face he has come to know well and he knows that she knows that this is about the jump again.

“You’re welcome, Alex,” she says and then leaves the dining room.

• • • •

It isn’t that Jessie doesn’t care about the jump.

She just sees it differently than Mike. This thing wasn’t supposed to happen. It was an accident of the universe. To want it to happen more than once, in one life, is crazy. Isn’t it? What would be the odds? And why would you need it to happen again? How practical is teleporting if you can’t predict it? It is a silly thing, really. A silly little thing.

Yet Jessie still looks back on the day in amazement. Sometimes, in rare moments, she relives it. It is special because of its elusiveness. Because it doesn’t explain itself. For her, it is damn near divine. And she finds it empowering to have experienced it. She is of a small order who knows a secret. She and Mike have glimpsed behind a curtain. They have precious knowledge. Shouldn’t it bring them closer together?

She tries to talk to him about her thoughts, but it seems to just excite in him an unhealthy obsession.

“We should keep trying, then. Try to master it.”

“No,” she says, and it isn’t a rebuttal of the idea itself. She just doesn’t want to master it. She likes it where it is, something distant, to look at only when needed. She doesn’t want it to be her life. It is just a jump. A beautiful jump, yes. But it doesn’t deserve worship. Worship ruins all the best things.

• • • •

Mike wants to tell everyone.

He thinks about telling his friend Alex—“Yo, I teleported.” “Hey man, once with Jessie, I jumped from the park straight to my house!” “Al, you remember that movie about teleportation you hated? Jumper, was it? Yeah, well, me and Jessie . . . we did that.”—but it never sounds right. He thinks about telling people on the street. He thinks about just screaming it from the window of their apartment: “I teleported!”

He did try that once.

“So what?” a neighbor yelled back.

“Well,” he said, but he couldn’t think of a good answer.

Then a day comes when Mike walks into his room and his calendar has been taken down. He looks around and he finds it in the trash bin next to his work desk.

“You threw my calendar away?” he asks Jessie a moment later.

Jessie is reading a book on the couch, her legs folded under her. She looks up at him and he can feel what’s coming. “Stop counting,” she says. “I’m tired of you counting.”

Weeks later, she walks in on him standing in the middle of the bedroom. His knees are bent, his arms in front of him like he’s getting ready to box. His hands are bunched into fists. His face is full of lines, scrunched up in deliberate concentration.

“What are you doing?” she asks.

He looks at her, embarrassed. “Nothing,” he says.

“Yeah,” she says. “Right.”

• • • •

Mike believes he has a lot to be angry about. Jessie doesn’t care about the things that matter to him. She doesn’t try to understand where he is coming from, how much he needs the calendars, and the hope.

Sometimes he wonders why he’s stayed. This is a big question for most couples, but it is an even bigger question for Mike. He wonders if it is because of the jump or because of the love. He knows he loves her. This has never changed over all the years and the fights and the makeups. But he keeps thinking, maybe he stayed because she was there when the miracle happened. Maybe he hopes that if the miracle happens again, it will all be worth it. The years. The fights. The makeups. Love doesn’t always keep you where you’re supposed to be. But the miracle might have. Maybe all that’s left is the miracle. This thought scares him.

Why does it even matter so much? He doesn’t know. But he feels it every day. He comes home from work and he thinks of the jump. He is chilling with friends and the jump pops in and out of his consciousness. He is holding his wife and the jump is there, hanging in front of his eyes like an existential carrot he cannot catch.

He looks at his life and there is the jump, an island unto itself, surrounded by an ocean of monotony. Even when he is in a big moment, on the crest of some big wave, he can look out and see the island, and it calls to him, but he knows he cannot get there and it laughs at him. Vicious searing laughter.

• • • •

“I’ll make it up to you,” Mike says.

He has forgotten their anniversary again. “Sure you will,” she says.

It is not that she cares so much about these things. She is not that kind of sentimental. It is the fact that for years Mike has religiously crossed off each day on the calendar.

Mike’s hand is on her chest, right above her breasts. He follows the rise and fall of each breath, his hand light on her skin. “I’m sorry,” he says.

Jessie’s pissed. Why? she thinks. Because you’ve let this thing get so big that there isn’t any room for anything else? This stupid little thing.

But then she thinks there is something deeper in his apology beyond the forgetting. She thinks that he is saying sorry for many things. For all he has ever done that can’t be undone.

She doesn’t know if she is right. So many things go unsaid between them. But more importantly, she doesn’t want the truth to ruin the joy she feels in this moment. This moment that she believes that Mike is better than he actually is. Because reality is arbitrary. Because it doesn’t matter as much as the feeling. And she doesn’t have enough good feelings to let one slip away.

She tries to sleep but Mike’s hand feels heavy on her chest now. It is hard to sleep under so much weight, under this nagging feeling at the edge of her consciousness that this is the rest of their lives. Dancing around this little thing. Forever just out of reach, pulling at them. They’ve been married for four years and she is already breaking. What will be left of her after four decades?

It will always need to be fed, even when they are both trying to ignore that it’s there. Because these things take up too much space. There is no equivalency. No end to the feeding of these little monsters.

• • • •

Jessie takes Mike’s hand off of her chest and turns away from him.

“I said I was sorry,” he says. “I will make it up to you. I promise.”

But Jessie says nothing. Her breathing is the only thing punctuating this silence. This silence at the end of things.

Jessie is thinking of leaving. Mike knows this. There are so many regrets. But it is too late for regrets.

He is thinking of the jump even now, but it is swirled in there with the guilt. All the things he was unable to do for Jessie, the man he was unable to be. He still wants it, but now he wishes he could close his eyes and zero in on that want with his mind and send it off to some distant planet where it cannot hurt them anymore. But that seems even more impossible than that day so long ago.

In the end, if Jessie leaves, there will be nothing but the jump. And he doesn’t want to be alone with it. It will destroy him.

The old cliché of the light at the end of the tunnel. Mike laughs at it now. It is a fiction. There is light where he is. It is dim. It continues to dim. But there is no light ahead of him. All he sees is darkness.

• • • •

Two months after Mike and Jessie split, he returns to the apartment to pick up a stack of books Jessie decided were his and an old fedora he’d left behind. These are the final remnants of their shared world, the last excuse for them to see each other ever again.

Jessie meets Mike at the door, looks him up and down. He has dark circles under his eyes. He hasn’t cut his hair in weeks, it seems. A matted and unkempt beard covers the lower half of his face.

“Let’s do it again,” Mike says.

“What?” Jessie looks at him for a long time. The question is rhetorical. She’s heard him. She just hasn’t decided what she will do.

“One last time. For the road.” Mike waits for her to reject his offer, or get angry and roll her eyes at him. Or slam the door in his face. But she doesn’t do any of that.

“Okay,” she says.

“Okay?” he says, surprised and relieved. “Okay. Close your eyes. And picture home.”

She closes her eyes. This is the last time ever, she tells herself. A goodbye gift in honor of the thing that destroyed their lives. But even as she is thinking this, she can feel something frozen inside thawing against her will.

He believes then that she still trusts him—a trust he thought she had thrown away—and this gives him all the strength he needs to try again. He reaches out and grabs her hand.

“One,” he says. He holds her hand tighter. Jessie can feel all the hope in this grasp, all the want, and she surprises herself by responding, gripping his hand tighter as well. This shocks Mike and he feels his stomach tighten.

“Two,” he says.

They gasp aloud. This time feels different somehow. They can feel their hands merging. They feel the combination of all the times they’ve tried and failed and all the times they were too scared or angry to try. They feel their collective moments, a vibrating corporeality that squeezes tight around them, pulsing. They feel the release of the Earth’s gravity. There is nothing to hold onto. Nothing but each other. And it is perfect. It feels right. They can feel the hope of something beyond what they know; they can feel the universe as a solid, living thing, calling to them, urging them forward.

They say the last part together, Jessie’s voice unusually powerful, Mike as loud as a trumpet blasting over an ocean of years.

“THREE!”

©2018 by Cadwell Turnbull.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Cadwell Turnbull is a graduate from the North Carolina State University’s Creative Writing MFA in Fiction and English MA in Linguistics. He was the winner of the 2014 NCSU Prize for Short Fiction for his story “Ears” and attended Clarion West 2016. His debut novel, The Lesson, set in near-future U.S. Virgin Islands after an alien colonization, is forthcoming from Blackstone Publishing. His short fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Nightmare, and Asimov’s Science Fiction. He teaches ESL to adults in Charlestown, MA.

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

The Coin of Heart’s Desire

Yoon Ha Lee | 3090 words

In an empire at the wide sea’s boundaries, where the clouds were the color of alabaster and mother-of-pearl, and the winds bore the smells of salt and faraway fruits, the young and old of every caste gathered for their empress’s funeral. In life she had gone by the name Beryl-Beneath-the-Storm. Now that she was dead, the court historians were already calling her Weave-the-Storm, for she had been a fearsome naval commander.

The embalmers had anointed Weave-the-Storm in fragrant oils and hidden her face, as was proper, with a mask carved from white jade. In one hand they had placed a small banner sewn with the empire’s sword-and-anchor emblem in dark blue; in the other, a sharp, unsheathed knife whose enameled hilt winked white and gold and blue. She had been dressed in heavy silk robes that had only been worn once before, at the last harvest moon festival. The empire’s people believed in supplying their ruler well for the life in the sea-to-come, so that she would intercede with the dragon spirits for them.

The empress had left behind a single daughter. She was only thirteen years old, so the old empress’s advisors had named her Early-Tern-Journeying. Tern had a gravity beyond her years. Even at the funeral, dressed in the white-and-gray robes of mourning, she was nearly impassive. If her eyes glistened when the priests chanted their blessings for the road-into-sunset, that was only to be expected.

Before nightfall, the old empress’s bier was placed upon a funeral boat painted red to guide her sunward. One priest cut the boat loose while the empress’s guard set it ablaze with fire arrows.

Tern’s oldest advisor, a sage who had visited many foreign shrines in his youth, turned to her and said over the crackling flames and the lapping water, “You must rest well tonight, my liege. Tomorrow you will hold court before the Twenty-Seven Great Families. They must see in you your mother’s commanding presence, for all your tender years.”

Tern knew perfectly well, as did he, that no matter how steely her composure, the Great Families would see her as an easy mark. But she merely nodded and retired to the meditation chamber.

She did not sleep that night, although no one would have blamed her if she had. Instead, she thought long and hard about the problem before her. At times, as she inhaled the sweet incense, she wanted desperately to call her mother back from the funeral ship and ask her advice. But the advice her mother had already passed down to her during the years of her life would have to suffice.

Two hours before dawn, she rang a silver bell to summon her servants. “Wake up the chancellor of the exchequer,” she said to them. “I need his advice.”

The chancellor was not pleased to be roused from his sleep, and even less pleased when Tern explained her intent. “Buy off the Families?” he said. “It’s a bad precedent.”

“We’re not buying them off,” Tern said severely. “We are displaying a bounty they cannot hope to equal. They will ask themselves, if the imperial house can afford to give away such treasures, what greater might is it concealing?”

The chancellor grumbled and muttered, but accompanied Tern to the first treasury. The treasury’s walls were hung with silk scrolls painted with exquisite landscapes and piled high with illuminated books. The shapes of cranes and playful cats were stamped onto the books’ covers in gold leaf. Tiny ivory figurines no larger than a thumbnail were arrayed like vigilant armies, if not for the curious fact that each one had the head of an extinct bird. Swords rested on polished stands, cabochons of opal and aquamarine gleaming from their gold-washed scabbards, their pale tassels decorated with knots sacred to the compass winds. There were crowns of braided wire cradling fossils inscribed with fractured prophecies, some still tangled with the hair of long-dead sovereigns, and twisted ropes of pearls perfectly graduated in size and color, from shimmering white to violet-gray to lustrous black.

“None of these will do,” Tern said. “These are quotidian treasures, fit for rewarding captains, but not for impressing the Twenty-Seven Great Families.”

The chancellor blanched. “Surely you don’t mean—”

But the young empress had swept past him and was heading toward the second treasury. She drew out her heaviest key and opened the doors, which swung with deceptive ease on their hinges. The guards at the door eyed her nervously.

The smell of salt water and kelp was suddenly strong. A dragon’s single, heavy-lidded eye opened in the darkness beyond the doors. “Who desires to drown?” asked the dragon spirit in a low, resonant voice. It sounded hopeful. Most people knew better than to disturb the guardian spirit.

“I am Weave-the-Storm’s daughter,” Tern said. “They call me Early-Tern-Journeying.”

The eye slitted. “So you are,” the dragon said, less threateningly. “I’ve never understood your dynasty’s need to change names at random intervals. It’s dreadfully confusing.”

“Does the tradition trouble you?” Tern asked. “It would be difficult to change, but—”

The light from the hallway glinted on the dragon’s long teeth. “Don’t trouble yourself on my account,” it said. Musingly, it added, “It’s remarkable how you resemble her around the eyes. Come in, then.”

“This is unwise,” the chancellor said. “Anything guarded by a dragon is locked away for a reason.”

“Treasures hidden forever do no good,” Tern said. She entered the treasury, leaving the chancellor behind. The door swung quietly shut behind her.

Despite the dragon’s protection, it was difficult to breathe through the dream of ocean, and difficult to move. Even the color of the light was like that of rain and lightning and foam mixed together. The smell of salt grew stronger, interspersed curiously with the fragrance of chrysanthemums. But then, it was better than drowning.

“What brings you here?” asked the dragon, swimming alongside her. Its coils revealed themselves in pearlescent flashes.

“I must select twenty-seven gifts for the Twenty-Seven Great Families to impress them with the dynasty’s might,” Tern said. “I don’t know what to give them.”

“Is that all?” the dragon said, sounding disappointed. “There are suits of armor here for woman and man, horse and elephant. Give one to the head of each family—although I presume none of them are elephants—and if they should plot treachery, the ghosts that live in the armor will strike down your enemies. Unless you’ve invented gunpowder yet? The armor’s no good against decent guns. It’s so easy to lose track of time while drowsing here.”

Tern craned her head to look at the indistinct shapes of skeleton and coral. “Gunpowder?” she asked.

“Don’t trouble yourself about it. It’s not important. Shall I show you the armor?” The undulating light revealed finely wrought armor paired with demon-faced masks or impressively spiked chamfrons. She could almost see her face, distorted, in the polished breastplates.

“That’s no true gift,” Tern said, “practical though it is.”

The dragon sighed gustily. “An idealist. Well, then. What about this?”

As though they stood to either side of a brook, a flotilla of paper boats bobbed toward them. Tern knelt to examine the boats and half a verse was written on one’s sail.

“Go ahead,” the dragon said, “unfold it.”

She did. “That’s almost a poem by Crescent-Sword-Descending,” she said: one of the empire’s most celebrated admirals, who had turned back the Irrilesh invasion 349 years ago. “But it’s less elegant than the version my tutors taught me.”

“That’s because Crescent was a mediocre poet, for all her victories at sea,” the dragon said. “Her empress had one of the court poets discreetly rewrite everything.” Its tone of voice implied that it didn’t understand this human undertaking, either. “In any case, each of the boats is inscribed with verses by some hero or admiral. If you float them in the sea on the night of a gravid moon, they will grow into fine warships. To restore them to their paper form—useful for avoiding docking fees—recite their verses on a new moon. And they’re loyal, if that’s a concern. They won’t sail against you.”

Tern considered it. “It’s an impressive gift, but not quite right.” She envisioned her subjects warring with each other.

“These, then,” the dragon said, knotting and unknotting itself. A cold current rushed through the room, and the boats scattered, vanishing into dark corners.

When the chill abated, twenty-seven fine coats were arrayed before them. Some were sewn with baroque pearls and star sapphires, others embroidered with gold and silver thread. Some had ruffs lined with lace finer than foam, others sleeves decorated with fantastic flowers of wire and stiff dyed silk. One was white and pale blue and silver, like the moon on a snowy night; another was deep orange and decorated with amber in which trapped insects spelled out liturgies in brittle characters; yet another was black fading into smoke-gray at the hems, with several translucent capes fluttering down from the collar like moth wings, each hung with tiny, clapperless glass bells.

“They’re marvelous indeed,” Tern said. She peered more closely: Each coat, however different, had a glittering crest at its breast. “Are those dragons’ scales?”

“Indeed they are,” the dragon said. “There are dragons of every kind of storm imaginable: ion storms, solar flares, the quantum froth of the emptiest vacuum . . . in any case, have you never wondered what it’s like to view the world from a dragon’s perspective?”

“Not especially,” Tern said. In her daydreams she had roved the imperial gardens, pretending she could understand the language of carp and cat, or could sleep among the mothering branches of the willow; that she could run away. But dutiful child that she was, she had never done so in truth.

“Each year at the Festival of Dragons,” the dragon said, “those who wear the coats will have the opportunity to take on a dragon’s shape. It’s not terribly useful for insurrection, if that’s what the expression in your eyes means. But dragons love to dance, and sometimes people so transformed choose never to abandon that dance. At festival’s end, whoever stands in a dragon’s skin remains in that dragon’s skin.”

Tern walked among the coats, careful not to touch them even with the hem of her gown. The dragon rippled as it watched her, but forbore comment.

“Yes,” she said at last. “This will do.” The coats were wondrous, but they offered their wearers an honest choice, or so she hoped.

“What of something for yourself?” the dragon asked.

Some undercurrent in the dragon’s tone made her look at it sharply. “It’s one thing to use the treasury for a matter of state,” she said, “and another to pillage it for my own pleasure.”

“You’re the empress, aren’t you?”

“Which makes it all the more important that I behave responsibly.” Tern tilted her chin up to meet the dragon’s dispassionate gaze. “The treasury isn’t the only reason you’re here, is it.”

“Ah, so you’ve figured it out.” The dragon’s smile showed no teeth. It extended a hand with eight clawed fingers. Dangling from the smallest claw, which was still longer than Tern’s hand, was a disc rather like a coin, except it was made of dull green stone with specks in it like blood clots, and the hole drilled through the center was circular rather than a square. The most interesting thing was the snake carved into the surface, with every scale polished and distinct.

“Is it watching me?” Tern asked, disconcerted by the way the snake’s eyes were a brighter red than the flecks in the rest of the stone. “What is it called?”

“That is the Coin of Heart’s Desire,” the dragon said with no particular inflection.

“Nothing with such a name can possibly bring good fortune,” she said.

“It never harmed your mother.”

Then why had she never heard of it? “In all the transactions I have ever witnessed,” Tern said, “a coin must be spent to be used.”

The dragon’s smile displayed the full length of its jagged teeth. “You’re not wrong.”

Tern inspected the coin again. She was certain that the snake had changed position. “How many of my ancestors have spent the coin?”

“I lost count,” the dragon said. “This business of reign-names and funeral-names makes it difficult to keep track. But some never spent it at all.”

“Why isn’t it mentioned in the histories?”

The dragon’s eyelid dipped. “Because I like to eat historians. Their bones whisper the most delicious secrets.”

There was a saying in the empire: Never sing before an empty shrine; never dance with ghosts at low tide; never cross jests with a dragon. Tern said slowly, “Yet the empire has prospered, if those historians are to be believed. We can’t all have failed this test.”

The dragon did not deny that it was, indeed, a test.

Tern looked over her shoulder at the door. Its outline was visible only as an intersection of shadow and murky light. “There’s no other way out of this treasury.” When the dragon remained silent, she touched the coin with her fingertip. It was warm, as if it had lain in the eye of a hidden sun. She half-expected to feel the rasp of scales as the snake moved again.

The dragon withdrew its hand suddenly. The coin dropped, and Tern caught it reflexively. “I’m afraid not,” it said. “But that’s not to say that you won’t receive some benefit on your way out. The question is, what do you want?”

“What did my mother trade it for?”

“She asked to leave the treasury and never return,” the dragon said. “Two days and two nights she spent in here, contemplating her options, and that was what she came up with. She didn’t trust the treasury’s temptations. Of course, she thought she had been here much longer. Time moves differently underwater, after all.”

Tern tried to imagine her mother as a young woman, newly-crowned empress, hazy with sleeplessness and desperate to escape this test. “How long have I been here?” she asked.

“Not long as humans reckon time,” the dragon said. Its cheerfulness was not reassuring.

“The gifts for the Twenty-Seven Families,” Tern said. “Whatever becomes of me, will they be delivered to the court?”

The dragon waved a hand. “They’re yours to dispose of as you see fit. I’m done looking at them, so I don’t see why not.”

Tern glanced around again. She might be here for a very long time if this went wrong. “I know what I want,” she said.

The dragon drifted closer.

Her voice quavered in spite of herself, but she looked the dragon full in the eye. “I don’t know what bargain has bound you here all these years, but I want no more of it. Let this coin purchase your freedom.”

The dragon was silent for a long time. At last it said, “Dragons are unpredictable allies, you know.”

“I will take that chance,” Tern said. Was this reckless? Perhaps. But as she saw it, the empresses of her line were as much prisoners as the dragon was. Best to let the dragon pursue its own destiny.

“Someone needs to guard the treasury, you know.” The dragon canted its head. “You don’t seem to have a spare dragon.”

So this was the real price. “I will stay,” Tern whispered.

“A determined thief would make mince of you in minutes, you realize.”

Tern frowned. “I thought you’d want to leave.”

“I do,” the dragon said, “but I take my duty seriously. There’s only one thing to be done, then. Pass me the coin, will you?”

Not sure whether she was more bemused or bewildered, Tern did so. She felt a curious pang as the coin left her hand.

“The guardian of a dragon’s treasure,” the dragon said, “should have a dragon’s own defenses.”

With that, the dragon slipped out of its skin, so subtly that at first Tern did not realize what was happening. Scales sparkled deep blue and kelp-green, piling up in irregular coils around the dragon’s legs. The dragon itself took on the shape of a woman perhaps ten years older than Tern. Her black hair drifted around her face; her eyes were brown. Indeed, she could have been one of Tern’s people.

“The skin is yours,” the dragon said in much the same voice as before, “to use or discard as you please. Don’t tell me that I never gave you choices.”

“At least wear something,” Tern said, appalled at the thought of the dragon surprising the chancellor while not wearing any human clothes.

“Your empire won’t thank you for giving it to a dragon to rule,” the dragon said, although it did, at least, choose for itself a plain robe of wool.

“You will rule with a dragon’s sense of justice,” Tern said, “which is more than I can expect from the women and men out there who are hungering after a child’s throne.” She handed over the keys of her office.

The dragon’s smile was respectful. “We’ll see.” And, pausing at the threshold: “I won’t forget you.”

The door closed, and Tern was left with the coin and the dragon skin.

It was not until many generations later, when one of the dragon’s descendants braved the second treasury, that Tern learned that she had been given a dragon-name. Not a reign-name, for she was done with that, and not a funeral-name, for she was far from dead. The empire she had ceded was now calling her Devourer-of-Bargains. After all this time, she had come around to the dragon’s own opinion on this matter. It was a confusing human practice, but she wasn’t in any position to argue.

A number of generations after that, when a different empress braved the treasury, Tern asked what had become of the Dragon Empress from so many years ago.

The empress said, “According to the records, she disappeared after a sixty-year reign, leaving only a note that said, ‘I’m looking for another coin.’”

The empress was looking wistfully at a particularly lovely beryl set in silver filigree. Eventually she returned her attention to Tern, but she kept glancing back at it. The woman’s face looked oddly familiar, but Tern couldn’t place it. Probably a trick of her imagination.

The rest of the conversation was fairly predictable, but Tern contemplated the dragon’s sense of justice once the empress had gone. Time moved differently underwater, after all. She could wait.

©2013 by Yoon Ha Lee. Originally published in Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales, edited by Paula Guran. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Yoon Ha Lee is the author of Ninefox Gambit, which came out from Solaris Books in 2016, and was a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and Arthur C. Clarke awards. Its sequel, Raven Stratagem, was released in June 2017, and is a finalist for the 2018 Hugo Award. A third volume in the series, Revenant Gun, was released in 2018. Yoon’s short fiction has appeared in Tor.com, Lightspeed Magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Clarkesworld Magazine, and other venues, and a short story collection, Conservation of Shadows, was published by Prime Books in 2013. His . Lee grew up in both Houston and South Korea, and majored in math at Cornell University. He now lives in Louisiana with his family and an extremely lazy cat, and has not yet been eaten by gators.

You Pretend Like You Never Met Me, and I’ll Pretend Like I Never Met You

Maria Dahvana Headley | 6800 words

The worst day of Wells the Magician’s life begins pleasantly enough, with a shot of whiskey at the Lost Kingdom bar. It’s a birthday party day, and as all low-rent magic men know, birthday party days begin with booze and move laterally through coffee, cake, and whichever divorcee can be convinced to unhook her bra, whether offsite or in a back bedroom. Onward from there into (dire case) helium, (better case) weed, or (best case) coke, followed by a three a.m. cigarette before the road gets hit.

There are protocols in place.

At nine in the morning on this Saturday, with four hours to kill before he performs magic tricks at a fifth birthday party in a gated subdivision, Wells has three bourbons, neat, and one platter of fries, messy. Mayo. Ketchup. Hot sauce. Grape jam packets. Mustard. Maple syrup. Side of nacho cheese. Like that. He takes his time, stealth-assessing the woman in the back of the bar. She’s wearing a pair of too-small, heart-shaped, red plastic sunglasses, and at 10:15, Wells decides his next fifty years belong to her.

He formally signals the bartender.

“A round to woo the woe in the last row,” he says, pleased with himself.

“Not a move, bro. She’s been here five days,” the bartender says. “Leaves for two hours while Jake or I clean, gets back in the booth. Stays there, staring. You know I don’t judge my regulars, but something’s wrong with that one. Trust me when I say there’s no good version of getting her drunker.”

“Coffee, then?” says Wells, angling his head to get a better look. She’s maybe thirty, dark hair cut jagged, punk rock shifted into something else. He can’t tell if there’s a ring, but he likes them crazy enough that his occupation tempts rather than warns. There might be time for a bang before the birthday. He does the math. Definitely, if they walk out of here by 11:30.

The bartender shakes his head. “PG Tips. She’s a Brit.”

“Do it up,” Wells says, and waits for the kettle to boil, checking his bag of tricks while he does.

The tricks are in need of a dry cleaner and a few prayers, but it doesn’t matter. Five-year-olds believe in magic. Balloon animals and endless scarves, bubbles, cake. Kids this age hate card tricks, so he doesn’t bother. Coins, yes. Rabbits, yes, though Wells hasn’t got any at present. His most recent ex-wife, Amanda, shouted “Born Free!” as she walked away with their cage. The trick bag is an inheritance from Wells’s dad, who was an all-sorts magic man. Wells spent his childhood on the assist. An apple on his head, an arrow, a knife, Wells done up in sparkles, transformed into a sequined specialist. They drove a beat-to-shit minivan gig to gig, Wells playing the role of the magician’s glitz, followed by naps beneath gambling tables.

When Wells was fourteen, his dad got stabbed in Reno, outside a casino he was fleecing. Wells should have gotten stabbed, too, but the someone doing the stabbing just glanced at him, and bent back over Wells’s dad.

“Just need to fetch something for the boss,” said the stabber. “Don’t mind me.”

There was no blood, just sorting, like someone rooting in a sock drawer.

“Okay,” said Wells. His spine felt frozen and his guts were roiling, and the person he was talking to had eyes without whites. If this was a magic trick, it wasn’t the kind he knew the combination for, and if it was actual magic, he wanted nothing to do with it.

The stabber nodded, and continued to rummage.

Finally, they muttered, “Not there, is it? No. Bounced checks and bad bets. Selling things you don’t own. Not one thing, it’s another.”

They looked up at Wells again. “No kid was supposed to be here. It’s your lucky day. You pretend like you never met me, I’ll pretend like I never met you,” they said.

Wells caught a glimpse of claws and an additional glimpse of horns, but Wells was like that back then. He saw spectacle everywhere. When Wells nodded, the stabber disappeared without the aid of smoke and mirrors.

Wells picked his dad’s tricks up off the sidewalk, stood, and walked away. Told the police he’d missed the murder. Told the casino he didn’t know who did it and that he wasn’t pursuing it. Told the driver who picked him up hitchhiking that he’d been traveling alone for a year, and that he was looking to get his ass to Tahoe. A few other things happened, soon after that. Wells decided to deny them, too. Pretend like you never met me, he thought, and moved on, town to town for thirty years.

Lately, he’s been haunting Boise, Idaho. He’s learned how to say the name of the place, the “sea” instead of “zee,” and so people think he’s local enough to last.

Every day, Wells puts on the cheapo tux and the clip-on polka-dot tie, polishes the shoes. A hundred bucks and wine coolers in the kitchen with the moms, who will be, if experience is any guide, thirsty. Wells checks the bag for candy. Quality lollipops will make true believers out of most people. He steals a glance at the woman in the back booth. She’s got a notebook out and she’s scribbling something in it. She looks testy. It’s 10:32.

Wells nudges the bartender. He can see steam. Good enough. The bartender pours water into the mug. Wells adds a teabag and dunks it frantically. The woman takes off her sunglasses. There’s an expression on her face Wells doesn’t entirely like, but her blue eyes are visible from here, along with mascara that’s made its way from lashes to ashes, dust to destiny.

He’s a sucker for messes like this one.

“You cunt,” the woman comments, unsolicited from just behind him as he’s reaching for the milk. “The water must be boiling, or the tea will be weak. And the teabag must be added before the water.”

Wells turns his head and takes the opportunity to examine her. Thirty-five, chewed lipstick, and there might be blood on the sleeve of her dress, which also seems to be a nightgown, but who’s counting flaws? Wells is on the north side of forty, and some of his tattoos are starting to look like cancer. The ones he got more recently pop like goldfish from a carnival bowl, and those are the ones that matter. He flexes the bicep closest to her.

He considers a coin trick. He could pull one from her clenched fist. What kind of coin, though? He never knows what the bag will give him. Soon after his dad died, he found a pile of peep show tokens in the bottom, and took his miserable self to see some sparkle. Sometimes, he drops his hand in just to see what kind of currency he touches, and then plans his life accordingly.

This time, he gets a wooden nickel, and ignores it.

“The. Water. Must. Be. Boiling,” the woman repeats. “Otherwise, things end up useless.”

Wells pours milk, being helpful, but she unexpectedly slaps the mug, and overturns it. Warmish tea drips into Wells’ lap.

“You don’t add the milk until the tea’s had time to steep,” she says. “It takes longer than you think. Particularly if the bloody water wasn’t even boiling in the first place.” She makes a moan that is closer to a sob. “I can’t bear America.”

“I’ll buy you a better cuppa,” Wells says. “It’s on me.”

Her dress is torn, yes, and possibly stained, but it’s flowered. Her cheeks are rosy. English rosy. He envisions something he saw on the BBC, in the dead of night between divorces, a flushed woman in a flowered gown, corset unlaced. Blowsy, he thinks. Yes, a wedding ring. No problem. The stones are turned toward her palm.

“Cuppa?” she says, and her tone is ominous. “BBC, isn’t it. Butlers. That’s the accent you’re using. You’re mangling it. Were you any sort of butler, you’d know how to make a proper pot of tea.”

She plucks a cocktail straw from the backbar, and fracks his drink to the dregs.

“I can fix it,” Wells tries. “I’m a magician.”

She mishears him, probably on purpose. “No. There’s no medicine for this.”

She fishes the teabag out of her empty mug, shoves it in his open mouth, and walks toward the door.

“You’ll be driving, then,” she says, over her shoulder.

One problem Wells the Magician has always had? He loves damage.

Wells chews the teabag for sobriety, tasting black leaves like a terrible fortune, drops a twenty from the tricksack on the bar and follows her. He feels himself getting hard.

“Bro, no,” the bartender calls after him. “That’s a no go. I’d watch out for her.”

“You don’t know me,” says Wells. “This is my whole thing.”

• • • •

In the lot, there is only one vehicle, and she’s standing beside it, tapping her foot.

“Nice car,” she says. “If car’s what you call this.”

Wells’s car is a literal lemon. It’s a VW bug, painted canary and dimpled with dots made by, Wells suspects, a ball peen hammer. It was part of the flotsam from a foreclosed lemonade stand, and cost four hundred dollars. When Wells took possession of the car after the auction, he opened the trunk and a compressed lemon mascot suit popped out, nearly giving him a heart attack. Also included in the sale were seventeen hundred hollow plastic lemon sippy cups, three hundred and seventy-eight insulated thermal lemons, and forty-five flammable velveteen novelty lemon pillows, each emblazoned with the name and disconnected phone number of the lemonade stand’s former owner. They filled the entire interior. Wells went to the dump and gave everything over but the lemon suit, which he kept, just in case. He’s pretty sure it’s rated for cold, and his last wife ($299 divorce, cheaper than the car) took his camping gear when she went rogue.

Wells isn’t a whimsical man—no magician is—but he could see the utility of a vehicle like this: it is so noticeable that no police officer would imagine its driver committing crimes while behind the wheel. Wells is essentially invisible inside its yellow shell, and whether he speeds, drinks, or drugs his way through an evening, he trusts that no one believes their eyes.

The lemon sticks when he drives it, but he’s had the side painted with his logo nonetheless. Wells the Magician it says, in calligraphy, with a picture of a top hat and a clutter of stars.

The woman’s hand is on the hood, and her nightgown is the shortie kind. Wells feels optimistic.

“My house is seven minutes away.”

“Wishes, horses, beggars,” she says, wrests open the passenger door, gets in, and waits. Right, then. Usually he sprints under the red flags of feminine vigilance. He inherited charm from his mother. Women have always been willing to sleep with him, no matter the evidence he’s nothing good. There’s still time.

He takes the address the woman gives him.

He’s not sober. She’s not sober either. Whatever. Wells has a shortlist of ways he’s willing to die. He imagines everyone does. Sometimes you manage to hit a Venn diagram of death wishes in a one-night stand. There should be a dating app to match methods. He laughs as he puts the lemon into gear. She looks at him. He stops laughing.

He drives out from the bar and into the country, half a silent hour in the general direction of nowhere. At last, she points.

“There.”

A Victorian mansion, all gingerbread and gilding, creamy turrets, stained glass windows. She doesn’t look like she belongs to a place like this, but goes to show. Wells is midway up the walk behind her when he sees the sign: Nix & Sons, Funeral Home.

“Hang on,” he says.

She turns around and looks at him.

“What? This isn’t what you were hoping for? Most things aren’t,” she says.

She walks into the mansion, shutting the door behind her.

It’s suddenly 12:15. Wells gets back into the lemon and opens his glovebox kit to brush the bourbon out of his breath, swab his face with a wipe, and slick his hair into top hat formation. Bag of tricks intact. He fishes for a coin, just to see. A silver dollar might bode well, but there’s nothing. He takes a few minutes to stabilize. Win some. Lose most. This is the life of a hack magician, a man whom true magic has not bothered with. Wells’s father could do anything. He’d disappear in the middle of a crowded room, drive a car while sitting in the backseat. Once, he floated stark naked over an entire casino, looking over shoulders and reading hidden hands, while Wells kept watch over his tux.

Where’d he get his magic? He made some jokes about soul sales. Sometimes, when he’s not thinking about the thing he agreed to forget, Wells wonders who is ever kidding about anything.

“Dirt cheap,” his dad said once of his immortal soul, as he was cleaning up a hotel room full of pantyhose, beer bottles, baubles, and Bibles never opened. “Never was anything but shirt deep.”

Wells was twelve years old at the time, drinking a Jolt Cola and trying to learn how to make girls appear out of thin air. It didn’t work if you didn’t have any willing and around to begin with. He’s still never learned.

As he pulls out of the lot, Wells catches sight of the woman emerging onto the porch with an enormous floral arrangement. She’s changed into a black dress. He raises his hand to wave, then thinks better of it, but she waves to him. No, that’s a finger in the air. Alright then, leave it.

She’s filled Wells’s car with the smells of new sweat and old perfume. She’s nothing special, not a ghost, not a queen, just his usual kind of trouble. An Amanda or a Bridget or, god help him, a Sonja. He doesn’t even know her name.

She walks down the steps with a driver and gets into the passenger seat of a hearse. Wells shudders as the coffin mobile pulls out.

Wells, in classic Wells fashion, has definitely hit on a newly-minted widow.

He rolls down his windows and ushers awkwardness out. Awkwardness is the enemy of magic. He follows the hearse decisively out onto the highway, thinking to flee, but finds himself idiotically part of a long procession of black sedans interspersed with black motorcycles. Wells is appalled by the rudeness of bikers invading a funeral procession, but then . . .

The riders are wearing black suits, and Wells is the lone lemon in an all-mourner motorcade. A man with a long white beard turns his head as he passes, and gives Wells a look that says he’s broken all laws of civility. The biker has stars tattooed across his face, and his eyes are pink from weeping.

Wells is reminded of the last rabbit he had, a hostile albino lop named Richard. He glances at the rabbit’s top hat, sitting for now in the backseat. He’s visited by a vision of the woman wearing it and drinking a perfectly made mug of tea. Her ring is turned the right way round, but it’s not the ring she was wearing. It’s his own mother’s ring, the one he hasn’t ever presented to a wife, though he’s had two so far. Wells spent his entire childhood traveling with his dad, leaving his mother behind. He only has his mom’s wedding ring because she took it off one morning when he was eleven, left it in an eggcup, and walked. Years ago he dropped it into the bag of tricks, and he hasn’t seen it since.

He pulls over and lets the funeral procession pass. Trying to save a pretty woman from preexisting problems is not any kind of plan. Maybe one of the mothers at the birthday will be plausible. He considers himself in the rearview. Not too shabby. Or, at least, no shabbier than usual.

“The water must be boiling,” he says. He says it louder. “THE WATER MUST BE BOILING OR THE TEA WILL BE WEAK.”

Wells pulls off the highway entirely, and steps on the gas.

• • • •

There’s a trail of colorful balloons, and cheerful printed signs guiding civilians to Ammy’s birthday.

This seems wrong. Wells checks his contract.

He isn’t the only one having an off day. The parents have misspelled their own daughter’s name. He pulls up to the house, and—how late is he? Parents look shitfaced. He checks his watch. No, he’s fine. There are people teetering their way around the premises, though, and in the kitchen they’re slumped over salsa. Two are chainsmoking. A few more are crying. Screw that, Wells thinks. He congratulates himself again on his vasectomy, undisclosed to his wives, who thought they were the problem. Parents sometimes punch magicians in the head for no reason. Wells stays on guard.

He scans the crowd for Ammy, and finds her, plastic-crowned and pink-frocked, her expression that of a kid about to vomit or tantrum.

Wells reconsiders this party. It’s October, and it’s fifty-one degrees. The swimming pool is open, and Wells has no doubt that he’ll soon find himself in the water, rescuing a kid from drowning. He takes a step back. They haven’t seen him yet. He still has time. Just a minor magic trick involving illusion and he’ll be out—

But Ammy’s got him around the knees. She’s glaring up at him, a freckled kid with the eyebrows of a seventy-year-old man.

“Are you the magician?” she asks. “You don’t look like you know magic.”

“Are you Amy?” he asks. “You don’t look like you know magic either.”

“Ammy,” she says, and curls her lip. Of course she is.

“DOES HE KNOW MAGIC?” she screams, startling him.

“He doesn’t,” says another kid. “He’s a dummy.”

“DUMMY!” shout four at once.

Wells brings an emergency wand from behind his back and does a trick involving a bouquet of flowers appearing out of thin air. The kids give no fucks. He transforms the flowers into vending machine slugs, because that’s what the bag offers him. The kids origami themselves down into a pointed-knee circle. They’re still grim, but he’s bought himself three minutes. He glances furtively at the parents. They seem to be heading toward a miserable key party. There’s hugging where there shouldn’t be hugging. Embraces are lasting too long.

He waves his wand and makes the slugs into a series of sparkly explosions.

There is the opposite of applause. One of the kids starts up the kind of whimper that’s contagious, and it’s only a matter of time. Well brings out the top hat, and pulls from it a lifelike rabbit puppet, which usually goes over incredibly well. It’s not Richard the Rabbit, but it’s something.

The voice of a dad carries from the house. “I mean how does this happen? How does she let it happen?”

A mom joins in. “And him? What was he thinking? How do you—No, I can’t even.”

Wells fumbles for lollies. He’s half-buried in the bag of tricks, closing his fist around what feels like a gold bar, when his day officially dives into the shitter.

“MAGICIAN, LISTEN,” Ammy says, and it’s an order. “Mica was on a motorcycle with his daddy.”

“The road was slippery,” says another kid. “It was raining.”

“Now, Mica’s over there,” says a third kid.

Wells looks slowly up from the lollipops. The kids are pointing into the distance, down the highway, and Wells knows exactly where they’re pointing. He can imagine what’s happening in that cemetery right now, bikers, little coffin, flowers, and the woman from the bar standing beside the grave in her black dress and heart-shaped sunglasses, having spent days in shock, having not changed her clothes since the accident, and he, Wells, couldn’t even get the water hot. He couldn’t get the tea into the water. He couldn’t get the milk into the tea.

“The hospital tried to fix him, but they couldn’t,” says Ammy.

How can a five-year-old have him by the collar? The children inch closer. Wells has become a sacrifice in the middle of a ring of tiny witches.

“They couldn’t fix him,” the children repeat, mimicking someone else, their teacher, or a parent. “Mica died.”

“Did Mica’s dad die too?” he asks, stalling.

“He only got hurt,” says Ammy, and visibly seethes.

Something is pushed into his hand. It’s a drawing in crayon. A little boy, a mother in a flowered dress, and a man on a motorcycle.

“Do the magic,” Ammy demands. “DO THE MAGIC.”

“Which magic?” he asks. He shouldn’t ask. He knows.

“Make Mica alive again,” she says.

The rest nod, like bringing someone back to life is a matter of cups and balls, a cabinet, and a wand wave.

No one is crying. Everyone believes. The mob of kindergarteners stares at Wells the Magician, he of no skills, he of two divorces and one VW lemon, a forty-five-year-old failure, charged with raising the dead, and Wells stares back, frozen.

This is the truth of the matter: Wells’s dad probably could’ve done this. Whoever his deal was with, a devil or a god, Wells’s dad was the real thing, and Wells is not.

For example: A few days after Wells left his dad’s body in Reno, there was an incident in the night kitchen of a diner, a smashed cockroach, and Wells, on his knees, trying to steal hamburger buns.

Wells touched the roach and said a word he’d heard his dad say, and the roach shook itself and looked up at him, abruptly unsmashed. It spread its antennae, and skittered off into the space behind the range. Wells wasn’t sure. Maybe this was a thing cockroaches could do.

He tried again and again, for years, delicately, roadkill raccoon, nest-fallen songbird, frozen squirrel, but nothing.

Maybe it had been the last remnant of his father’s magic, still hanging out nearby. No real magic has come out of him since.

Still, he finds himself lifting his mail-order wand, to attempt what, exactly? Just as he’s about to make the horrific choice of chanting some sorcery-sounding gibberish, a mother comes out singing, candles lit, cake balanced, and the kids turn away from life and death, and toward sugar, leaving Wells, thank fuck, to tend to his own self.

He stands at the edge of the pool, away from the party, panting. Magic requires leaps of faith. It’s been decades since he’s leapt, and the same since he’s been faithful. He has no paper sack to breathe into, so he uses his bag of tricks. There’s no gold bar in there. He sees some ripped up old Italian lire. Not even valid currency.

When Ammy blows the candles out, though, he’s hit by a gust of wish. He takes a stumbling step backward, and finds himself floating on air.

No. Not floating. Falling.

Wand, tuxedo, top hat, puppet rabbits and all, baptized. He’s a teabag in lukewarm, chest-deep water, the dried remnants of his heart filtering pitifully, weakly, through the pool.

He struggles out of the water, drags himself to the lemon, and takes the long way back to town, making sure not to pass the cemetery. Two wet puppet rabbits seem to be glaring at him from the passenger seat. One of them has bright red around its mouth. He starts to pull over in a panic, but no, it’s only melted lollipop.

“This is not your fault, Wells,” he tells the car, the air, himself. “None of this is your fault.”

Back at the Last Kingdom he orders three more bourbons, even though he slunk off from the party without getting paid. The bartending shift has changed, there is that mercy, and so when the bartender lines up his drinks, no one’s counting.

He doesn’t want to be a magician. He wants to be something and someone else.

Wells unfolds the damp crayon drawing from his pocket and spreads it on the bar. A little boy, a mother, and a father on a motorcycle.

As Wells squints at the paper, the motorcycle turns into a wheelchair. The little boy disappears. The mother stands up, looking literal daggers at the father, and a Crayola man in a top hat and a tuxedo walks into the picture and adds himself to the family. Wells crumples the paper as fast as paper can be crumpled. He isn’t doing this magic trick. Whoever is, bourbon or bad day, it’s not funny.

One drink later, he un-crumples and smooths it.

The man in the tuxedo reaches out his arms, the mother falls into them, and the father wheels his chair off the paper. Lightning jags from the sky, a gold scrawl, and the magician holds it in his hands—

Something clatters. Wells looks down and sees his car keys on the ground. The figures on the paper aren’t moving. There is no such thing as magic. He shifts to the back booth.

When he opens his eyes sometime later, the neon is blazing, and the line to get a drink at the Lost Kingdom is four deep. The windows are fogged over. Wells wonders if he’s dead.

He looks to his left and sees a bearded face tattooed with stars, a pair of pink-rimmed rabbit eyes peering down at him.

“Richard?” he says. This is not the man’s name, but a long-gone rabbit’s name is the only name Wells can remember.

“It’s the lemon,” says the biker. “It’s the fucking lemon who thought he was a comedian.”

“I’m not a comedian,” Wells protests. “I’m a magician. See?”

He pulls an ancient coin from out of Richard’s beard, and then rains subway tokens from Richard’s ears for good measure.

Richard levitates Wells as easily as plucking a lop from a top hat. He’s massive, dressed all in black leather, and Wells looks down on the Lost Kingdom from an unpleasant height.

“Caro,” Richard yells. “Is this fuckshow someone from Kenny’s family? If not, I’m dropping him in the dumpster.”

Wells dangles, inhaling the sickly scent of lilies. There’s a funeral arrangement draped over a table, on which there is a giant photo of a little boy, grinning in a pair of heart-shaped sunglasses. A woman Wells knows is at the table, too, hunched over a steaming cup, mascara striping her face like warpaint.

“Drop him,” she says.

Wells plummets. He makes it to his hands and knees and crawls toward her feet. Black heels. A fresh tattoo on her calf of a mother and a son, the two of them holding hands and facing the universe. Both figures are oozing blood.

He looks up, and she’s looking down at him. Blue eyes. Rosy cheeks. Hair cut with a dull knife. She’s the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen.

“You again,” she says.

“I can bring him back,” he hears himself say. “I can bring Mica back from the dead. I’m a magician.”

Her fist approaches him formally, and he feels his nose bend like a spoon. There’s a tsunami of tattooed biceps and rolled-up shirtsleeves from the room at large. A bottle breaks. Wells’s skull is made of glass, and inside it, there is a spark like a penny becoming electric.

Wells glows for a few seconds, but the light goes out. High heels click past his face. There’s the sound of revving and roaring, and over all of that, her voice ringing out from the parking lot.

“FUCK THIS!” she shouts. “FUCK MOTORCYCLES! FUCK NIGHT! FUCK DEATH!”

“Caro,” someone says.

“FUCK YOU!” she screams. “GET AWAY FROM ME! PRETEND YOU NEVER MET ME!”

Wells walks backward into the dark until he’s underneath the universe and safely flat, invisible.

• • • •

The dayshift bartender scrapes the dropped magician off the floor and hands him a bag of frozen tater tots for his face. The bar’s empty. Wells is sopping. Maybe they poured their drinks out as they went past.

“I told you to watch out for her,” the bartender says. “Don’t think you’re driving like this, Wells. Cold front came in. Whole road’s made of ice.”

The bartender sets a mug of burnt coffee down in front of Wells, who drinks it. He eats an order of tots, and then walks shivering into five a.m., his tux freezing to his skin. All of this feels like basic destiny.

Wells opens the VW’s trunk, and strips down to his rubber-chicken printed boxers in the glow of the Lost Kingdom sign. The lemon mascot suit is made of shaggy yellow fur and is fleece-lined. Its legs are mysteriously thermal. There’s no explaining why a summer suit was constructed this way. It has a pointy hood, decorated with green leaves. Wells zips himself in, and puts his boots back on. Snow’s falling like cheapola confetti.

Wells drives the lemon to a 7-11 and buys a thermos.

While he stands at the beverage station, staunching his nose with his dad’s scarf trick and waiting a thousand years for the kettle on the hotplate to boil, he thinks about performing with his father, thirty years ago, posing in front of a glittering backdrop, his dad throwing a knife at his heart, and the oohs from the crowd as the knife diverted midair and stung the ceiling. His dad, grinning and bowing. Mustache. Top hat. Magic.

Every once in a while, the knife would go a little way in, and every once in a while, Wells would wake up with a Band-Aid under his t-shirt. Just once, something went wronger than usual and Wells woke up frozen, wristbanded, on a gurney. His dad pushed the gurney out of the basement of the hospital, and there was Wells, alive again.

“Sorry about that, buddy,” said his dad, and laughed. “Overkill.”

Wells laughed too, but he wasn’t sure what he was laughing about, the “buddy,” never a word his dad would use, or the pun, classic magician patter.

“Done with that business,” his dad said, and thumped Wells hard on the shoulder. “I put it back. Shouldn’t have taken it out in the first place, but I thought I’d keep it for a rainy day.”

“What back?” said Wells, with some difficulty. His jaw was stiff, and there was cotton packed toward the back of his teeth.

“Still feeling hollow? It’ll get better. Milkshake?”

Wells concluded that this had something to do with tonsils or teeth, and nothing to do with death. They went to a diner, and little by little, he felt himself return from elsewhere.

Soon after that, though, his father was dead, and Wells was tricking strangers in a bus station. How many kinds of illusion can a person do in a lifetime? Flash paper, wallet spirited out of a pocket, a loud noise, and Wells would be gone. No funeral for his father. Nowhere to go but out into the wide world, alone.

He loves damage. Loves it.

He drops half a box of teabags into the bottom of the thermos, pours the boiling water over them, and waits another thousand years before he tugs them out. He dribbles the milk in carefully. He pays with a pile of ones he’s found in the bag, each with the face of his father instead of Washington. The cashier doesn’t notice.

• • • •

Wells has never been into the cemetery before, just seen it from the road, the white stones like cards dropped on a green felt table. He walks it, thermos in hand.

As morning grays the horizon, he sees her standing on a hill beside a heap of fresh dirt.

She’s wearing a leather jacket, and black motorcycle boots, inches too big. She has a helmet on too.

“You for the third time,” she says. She cocks her head at him. “Did I break your nose, then?”

“You did,” he says.

“That was the idea.” She barks a laugh, but she’s crying. “I stole my husband’s best friend’s bike and kit. All those bikers came for my husband. He’s their family. I’m nobody’s family.”

“I was sorry to hear about your—” he says, and then doesn’t know what to say.

“Kenny’s from here. I was living in London. He was riding through. It looked good to me. I got on. He isn’t a bad guy, but he has bad judgment. Look at who he married. He took our son for a ride in the middle of the night and ran into a tree, but he didn’t die. They’re all around his bed convincing him it wasn’t his fault, but it was. Tell me how that’s fair. Tell me how that happens.”

She sobs once, and then she’s done. Wells notices the second helmet dangling from her fingers. It’s small and red, to match the sunglasses she still has around her neck.

“What kinds of tricks can you do, then, Wells the Magician?” she says, after a moment.

“Cards, coins, bunnies.”

“I watched a magician saw a woman in half once,” she says. “In Brighton. She got rid of everything below the heart. That was a thing to see.”

He holds out the thermos.

She takes it. “And there’s a trick. You know what I don’t take in my tea?”

“Lemon,” he replies, “Obviously.”

“It curdles,” she says. “I don’t take sugar either. So stay away from me with your vulgarian attempts at sweet.”

“No sugar or lemon in there,” he says. “Despite appearances.”

Steam makes a cloud over her face as she pours tea into the cup and sips. She looks at Wells, and raises an eyebrow.

“Quite nice,” she says. “If milky.”

“I followed your directions.”

“It’s nursery tea, but it’ll do. One for the fates,” she says, and flings a drop of tea into the air. “One for the furies.” She pours a shot of tea into her hand, and smears it over the temporary grave marker.

“And one for the one I leave behind here, in this fucking ground, in this fucking country.”

She pours a shot of tea onto the grave itself.

Blood drips unexpectedly from Wells’ nose and lands on the snow, mixing with the tea. He’s turning to apologize, when the ground groans.

There’s a muffled explosion deep beneath the surface, and both of them lurch as dirt and snow are displaced. Gravel peppers his face. A rock bounces off her helmet.

The grave spits the coffin out.

It lands hard, and shudders. There’s a sound as the coffin opens. Wells isn’t sure who makes it, him or her. In the coffin, there’s a boy, eyes closed. Alive? Dead? There’s no way to tell.

Caro lunges toward her son, then stops.

Someone else is with them now, someone Wells has met before.

The stranger is wearing a coat made of smoke. There’s ice forming on Wells’s spine, and his heartbeat hesitates. Whether this is death or a devil, it hasn’t noticed him. Old agreements were bound in blood, and if he agreed he never met this thing, it agreed it never met him, too.

Caro’s fists are clenched. She smells like tea leaves being insisted into a fortune.

“No,” says Caro to the thing that stabbed Wells’s father. “It’s me you’ll be taking.”

“That old trope,” says a voice made out of last calls. “If I wanted you instead, I’d have had you instead. I didn’t ask to be brought here. Whatever summoned me, it was old business, not new. I’ll be off.”

Foggy tendrils twist toward the boy, and the smoke steps backward, one foot in the grave, clinging to the coffin. Caro pivots in her stolen boots, and swings the thermos of tea at the stabber’s head. Wells watches in despair.

She’s not going to win. She’s mortal, and she has no magic. All she has, is that she’s the mother of this child.

Wells is bourbon and hamburgers and a life spent spending every last cent on simple sins. Love has found him wanting. He’s stood in rooms full of birth and thought about dying. He’s a minor magic man with nothing but his broken life to lose.

And so.

Wells upends his bag of tricks and pours it out. He’s only ever fumbled for fixes, but the bag is larger than it looks. Here in the snow, now, are all the things Wells has ever lost.

The house he used to dream of living in, a wedding ring belonging to his mother, a history he’s spent decades hiding from. His mother screaming at his father, and then closing the kitchen door, his father in the center of the linoleum. A college-ruled notebook full of promises, a candle sputtering, a cloud of smoke around him. Wells was there when magic showed up in a mobile home.

Overkill.

How old was Wells? A high chair? A platter of peas, thrown one by one. Young enough that language eluded him, but he was there as his dad took his hand and cut a fingertip, making him part of the bargain, capable of carrying the bag of tricks and everything else.

The thing the stranger was rummaging for, all those years ago, was here, inside the sack. Wells was the bag carrier, the little piece of nothing, bearing his father’s soul and keeping it safe from any bad bargains. At one point, Wells’s own soul was in the sack too, maybe destined for a cup and ball swap, maybe just out of his dad’s bad habits.

Wells feels the magic that’s always been beside him, that rode in the passenger seat, that provided him with coins and stars and smoke, that messed with his marriages.

Now it’s in the snow. Wells reaches down and picks it up.

He has no real magic words for this old business. A trade of merchandise. He dropkicks the soul long-owed into the grave, and yells the word his dad taught him for rabbits and balloons.

“ABRACADABRA!”

And there is his father, in the middle of the air, naked and floating over the grave, a deck of cards orbiting him. There is his father, looking to Wells and nodding.

The open grave is full of smoke, like dry ice in a punch bowl. Like magic in a retirement home, this kind of death, its tricks visible in the light. Wells can hear a marching band somewhere, and he can feel confetti dropping out of the sky, and he can smell the scent of the perfume his mother used to wear.

The stabber is standing below Wells’s father, opening smoky arms, and taking the wandering soul in them. The coffin is open, and now it contains a naked magician.

Wells feels death depart the premises, and his own heart begins to beat properly again, in a way it hasn’t in years. The coffin is gone, and the grave is closed over. The show is done and the curtains are drawn, and Wells looks around, expecting a broom and a janitor, no joy, no glory, not even any roses.

Everything is as it was, except—

There is a little boy, very still on the ground, in a frozen slick of tea. There’s a pair of sunglasses shaped like hearts, cracked across one lens. There’s a helmet on the hillside, upturned. There’s an old wedding ring, glowing red, and then cooling, in a tarnished pile of pennies.

The bag of tricks is gone, but it isn’t necessary. Those were old tricks, and this is something else.

There’s a woman in leather, and she’s on her knees. There’s Wells in his lemon suit, and he’s on his knees too. There’s no such thing as magic.

And then, because magic doesn’t follow those rules, or any rules at all, the boy’s eyes open, and the woman goes to him, and the man goes to them, and the three are there, on the hilltop, with the whole world beneath them like a hat full of lucky rabbits, alive and kicking.

“Are you a magician?” the boy asks Wells. “I know magic.”

The boy leans toward Wells and touches his ear, and from the ear he pulls a coin, and the coin turns into a bird, and the bird flies up to spin across the sky and over the heads of sleepers and wakers in the town.

“Is there still tea, then?” Caro asks, and Wells passes her the thermos. The water is boiling now, and the tea is strong and dark. No one is crying. Everyone believes.

©2018 by Maria Dahvana Headley.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Maria Dahvana Headley is the author of the young adult sky ship fantasy Magonia, from HarperCollins, the novel Queen of Kings, the internationally bestselling memoir The Year of Yes, and The End of the Sentence, a novella co-written with Kat Howard, from Subterranean. With Neil Gaiman, she’s The New York Times-bestselling co-editor of the anthology Unnatural Creatures. Her short fiction has been nominated for the Nebula, World Fantasy, and Shirley Jackson awards, and has appeared at Uncanny Magazine, Tor.com, Lightspeed, Nightmare, Clarkesworld, Shimmer, Apex, Subterranean Online, and many more. It’s anthologized in Glitter & Mayhem, The Lowest Heaven, The Book of the Dead, twice in The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, The Year’s Best Weird Fiction, and three times in Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. Her latest novel is The Mere Wife, a contemporary retelling of Beowulf.

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

Conspicuous Plumage

Sam J. Miller | 4730 words

Summer meant freedom, and freedom was terrifying. Every window was open; every curtain billowed in the breeze. Darkness came and the street went on forever. I sat on the porch and hugged my knees, watched where Trench Street vanished into the gloom. Who was to say who or what might come walking up that street, into my life, and what terrifying things they might bring? Worse—who was to say where I could go, and what might happen to me when I got there?

Certainly not Mom and Dad. My parents were frozen solid, all summer long. Ice froze their tongues at dinner time. They said nothing to each other; nothing to me. My questions got cold, brittle looks and ice-shard answers. Even the television stayed turned down low, as if too much sound might shatter the icicle palace their grief had built.

Sometimes I couldn’t handle the ice, the silence, and I’d do something dumb, something I knew I shouldn’t, like someone might stand at the edge of a cliff and scream even though they know it’ll cause an avalanche and they might get crushed, because anything is better than freezing to death.

For example: “You never make spaghetti anymore”—because spaghetti was my brother’s favorite.

Or: “We should watch Ed Sullivan tonight,” because my brother always made us watch it, and somehow, always, through the sheer magnitude of his enthusiasm, made us enjoy it.

“Bette Davis Rosenblatt,” my mother would say, as sternly as she could, which was not very, whenever my father got up suddenly and fled to the upstairs bathroom.

When I was little, my parents only used my first and middle and last names together when I was being very bad. Now it’s all they call me.

• • • •

My brother’s hands became birds when he danced. Mere metaphors at first, the blur of motion and grace making them into something emblematic of freedom, and then—birds. Two of them, sometimes, his hands having broken free of his body and the fixed miserable limits of flesh, and sometimes a whole flock swooping and whirling around him. Sometimes, in his most inspired moments, like the time he and his friends staged a show in the gutted strip-mall shell of where the ballet school used to be, by the end of his dance he’d be nothing but birds. We still have photos. Look close and there is no Cary. Only starlings, grackles, owls, robins, and—Cary’s favorite—whippoorwills. An ornithologist’s nightmare of inter-species cooperation.

I saw the body. My parents wouldn’t. Movies make IDing a corpse into this big traumatic thing where moms weep and dads vow revenge, but really it doesn’t have to be a parent, doesn’t even have to be family. Two people who knew the person well. One, in some cases, but for Cary it was two, because the town is small and the funeral parlor guy was a family friend who’d seen my brother go from gangly fireball child to the solid handsome body that landed on his table.

Blue lips. Purple patches all over his body. Black where the skin had broken. Dried blood mostly cleaned up, but still visible in crusty streaks here and there. All terrible, I know; all signs of the violent end he met, but beautiful, too, in a way Cary would have appreciated. Like he’d transformed into something else. Conspicuous plumage, the anti-camouflage effect of brightly colored feathers found in predatory birds. Creatures too terrifying and magnificent to need to hide from anyone.

Did he freeze to death, beaten into a coma and left in the woods in flannel and jeans in awful North Country February? Did he die of his injuries? Bleed to death? Hard to say, our funeral parlor friend said, and even though the cops did their own autopsy, they didn’t dig too deep. Guys turn up dead along the Northway sometimes. It’s just a thing that happens. When it’s a reefer head or a gay guy or some other segment of the population that the police believe is especially prone to ending up dead, they don’t spend too much time looking for cause of death. Because they already know it. Boy made bad decisions, is what they figure. What else was gonna happen.

• • • •

Pterodactyls and tigers prowled the bowling alley parking lot. Elvis thumped from car speakers. Hank Williams. Boys, everywhere, squatting on fenders or leaning back behind the wheel. Blowing cigarette smoke lewdly in my direction. Streaks of fire circled me as I walked. Blue, green, and white, beautiful in their way, but nothing I wanted to stop and look at.

Inside was better. Beer and cigarette stink; the sharp fake vanilla of the spray they use on the rental shoes. Old men and women, and middle-aged ones, with no particular need or desire to display.

“Hey,” I said to Hiram Raff, who was right where I thought he’d be, polishing shoes in a corner where hardly anyone ever looked. Off the high school baseball field, Hiram was all awkward stammers and intentionally poor posture, ashamed and afraid of the adulation he had unwillingly earned.

“Hey,” he said, a little nervously, like What does this person want from me?

“How you doing?” I asked, fingers rubbing at an invisible spot on the counter.

“I’m all right,” he said, and his ruddy, lovely face said he most certainly was not. I felt awful, like I was frightening a small animal for selfish reasons, but I could not stop now.

“I heard you can make people see things,” I said.

Lines appeared between his eyes, and at the edges of his mouth. Poor boy looked close to bursting—into tears, maybe, or, simply bursting. I was a monster, I knew, but I had to say what I’d come here to say. I owed it to my brother.

“Can you help me? Can you come on a road trip with me?”

I had two pieces of information about Hiram Raff, both of them ill-gotten, gossip-derived. Common knowledge. Things he was deeply, irrationally ashamed of, for reasons that were his own. The first was what I’d already said: that under certain circumstances he could cause visions—of the past, of the future, of fictional scenarios that had never been and would never be, and whether he or anyone else could tell the difference was subject to much conjecture. The second was that he was had a congenital, terminal case of politeness. Hiram was a boy who could never tell anyone No.

Which is why, instead of fleeing from my invasive request, as he clearly wanted to, he frowned down at the rubber and canvas shoe in his hands and said:

“When?”

• • • •

Our house used to be alive with color. Walls would shift from blue to red without warning; the black-and-white beginning of The Wizard of Oz would be as bright and technicolor as the rest of it; my father’s eyes could change from emerald to gold. On nights when my mom and dad were getting ready to go out without us, the air around us would dance with a kind of small-scale aurora borealis. When we were little, my brother and I would run through the hallways playing with it, flapping our arms and blowing hard to watch the dancing clouds react.

My parents were seventeen when Cary was conceived, eighteen when he was born. Cary was eighteen when he died. They’re young, someone said, at the funeral, too young for something so awful, and I wondered when in your life it became okay for terrible things to happen to you.

Since then, the colors in our house are dead. Stuck. Static. Our mint bathroom wallpaper will not become anything else. Mom could make them change and dad could make them move, but now they do neither.

“Hey, Dad,” I said, the morning I was going to meet Hiram. August already, and hot. Dad was on the porch, as he often was, watching the end of the road. Not drinking. Drinking was another thing that had stopped.

“Hey,” he said, and scooted over to make room on the porch swing for me.

“I’m going to the movies,” I said.

“Okay.”

Not With who, not When will you be back. Having a father who let you do whatever you wanted was nowhere near as great as I’d thought it would be.

I sat. Waited. He didn’t put his arm around me. Didn’t say a word.

I stood up. He tried to smile and did not entirely succeed. I kissed his forehead. Turned to go. I wanted to shake him, scream, stomp my feet, howl, but I knew none of those things would make a difference. Dad was frozen solid, in there, somewhere. It would take something truly brutal to thaw him out.

• • • •

Hiram waved when he saw me. For a second he was a little boy, his smile wide and his motions impulsive, uncontrollable. He bounded down the steps and got into the car and my heart felt happy, light, like I was getting somewhere, like something would happen today, like a box had opened.

“Hi!” he said.

“Hey, Hi,” I said.

“Do you like rock?” he asked, fiddling with the radio before his seat belt was buckled.

“Sure,” I said, and remembered my brother the first time he heard Fats Domino. How his whole body moved, even while standing still. He’d been thirteen, then, and me eleven, and it was the first time I ever saw the birds. Three of them, ravens, probably, or no real bird at all, just a fledgling expression of the man my brother was becoming, and then they were red, and then they were green, and mom was in the doorway laughing.

Hi turned the knob slowly, navigating through the sea of static, landing on something mild and empty.

“Pat Boone,” I said. “Gross.”

“You don’t like him?”

“He didn’t write this song. My brother said the only reason anyone knows who the hell Pat Boone is because most of the radio stations in this country won’t play the guys who actually wrote these songs.”

“Why not?”

“Whites only,” I said. Cary was forever sending in for the things advertised in the backs of magazines down at the library, getting pamphlets and books in the mail. My brother knew things no one else in town knew.

Hiram was silent. “I didn’t know that,” he said, and frowned, and began to turn the knob again.

“Route 9,” I said, “and then head for the Northway.”

Only terrible music was on the radio. He turned it off when we arrived back at Pat Boone.

“I’m sorry about your brother.”

“Thank you,” I said. Our windows were down and we were leaving our town behind and it almost didn’t hurt to hear someone mention him.

“Is that where we’re going?”

“It is.”

• • • •

I don’t want revenge. This is not that kind of story. Even if I could find out who did this to my brother, there’s nothing I want to do to them. Living life after doing something like that is its own kind of punishment, and if he’s (they’re?) the kind of person (people?) who could kill somebody as beautiful as my brother, well, then, being that broken will cause him/them far more pain in future than puny Bette Davis Rosenblatt could ever dish out.

What I want is to know how it happened.

What I want is to know how to make it not happen to me.

• • • •

“What can you do?” Hiram asked, and when I didn’t answer: “What’s your . . . gift?”

Dead things whizzed past the car. Houses; trees; boulders. A whole frozen world of things, baking in the summer heat. Things that might have danced, once, but would never dance again.

“I don’t know,” I whispered. “I’m afraid to try.”

“Yeah,” Hiram said, and his voice sounded as thin and fragile as mine did. “That’s smart.”

• • • •

Driving, Hiram looked very sincere and thoughtful. His face relaxed and he didn’t seem anxious or frightened the way he always did when he spoke, so I let a long time go by without saying anything.

The river was fat, sluggish, still. Even the plumes of black smoke from the factories we passed just hung there, as motionless as the columns they came from.

“How did you know?” he asked. “What I can do?”

There was no safe answer. Nothing that wouldn’t hurt him. Nothing that wouldn’t crack that lovely face down the middle. I’d been about to say something like I don’t know, it’s just something I overheard someone saying, but I saw now that this would hurt him even more. Even if it was the truth. To be reminded that he was gossiped about, to hear again how the stories were passed from stranger to stranger, would be too devastating for fragile, private Hiram Raff.

I thought fast, said, “Sharon told me.”

On the median, between the north- and south-bound lanes, was a willow. Beside it slept a mammoth, big as the tree itself, long tusks and dense brown wool. Beside that sat a man, ragged and guitar-wielding. A traveler, a vagabond. A hitchhiker who couldn’t find a ride, whose song could summon monsters long gone from this world. What might that mammoth do, if he caught sight of me?

A mile passed, maybe five. Then Hiram said: “What did she tell you?”

I looked out my window. “Hardly anything. Just what you could do. I’d been asking around. To see who might be able to help me.”

“And what exactly do you want me to help you with?” he whispered.

I said nothing. I wasn’t entirely sure myself. My plan was flimsy, poorly-plotted. A child’s plan. My brother would have known how to do this right. My brother had skills he was not afraid to use. And while I hadn’t planned on telling Hiram, that seemed like the best way not to have to talk anymore about what had happened between him and Sharon, and what she did afterwards.

• • • •

It wasn’t Hiram who Sharon wanted. His big brother Herk was the one who wore the mantle of sports star the way it was supposed to be worn. Hard-drinking, friends with everyone, dumb in an attractive sort of way. Quick to anger, eager to sleep with any girl who looked his way, and more than a few that did not. When Herk finished school and went away to help lay down the interstate, all of Mohawk High grieved.

Under their father’s brutal tutelage, both boys had become baseball prodigies—but while Herk accepted and embraced that violent masculinity, Hiram balked at it. So he wasn’t prepared to stand outside of his brother’s shadow, least of all when it came to the women who’d flocked to him for the multitude of social perks that being his girl provided, and who now looked to Hiram to fulfill the same function.

And while Hiram could avoid the beer-soggy parties and evade the post-game advances of most of Mohawk High’s would-be popularity opportunists, he was no match for Sharon Baranchik.

“I saw . . . I don’t know what I saw,” she’d said. “The whole time, it was like the sky was pure Cinemascope. People I’ve never seen before, but who looked totally familiar. Like maybe they were me, in the future, or . . . I don’t know, a past life or something. And his eyes did this adorable scrunched-up thing—”

She went on like that, to anyone who would listen, her story so full of details that they must have mostly been made up. Nobody believed all of it, but enough people believed enough of it that Hiram was so upset he stayed home sick from school for three days.

I’d always believed that this had broken him. Watching him drive, now, I was fairly certain he’d been broken long before that, probably by something tiny, or not even a something, but a nothing, a missing piece, some tiny but crucial ingredient in the cake that was a fully-functional human being. And I thought of my brother, who dedicated whole dance cycles to trying to figure out why it was that he liked boys when most boys liked girls, and I thought of how hard it must be to end up completely normal, and whether I had, and whether I’d know it if I hadn’t.

• • • •

“I want to go to where it happened,” I said. “Where my brother was murdered. And I want you to show me what actually happened.”

“Oh, Bette,” he said, his voice like a boy about to cry. “That’s a terrible idea.”

“I know,” I said. “I need to see it. Are you with me?”

Hiram said nothing, because Hiram was still a boy who could not say no.

“It doesn’t work like that,” he said. “I can’t control what people see. Or when. Some things make it happen more, but . . . The chances that you’ll see what you want to see . . .”

“I’ll help you,” I said.

“How will you do that?”

“I have no idea,” I said, and laughed, and so did he. The Northway was narrowing by then, as we left behind the grimy little cities that surround the state capital. Nothing ahead of us but tiny dead frozen-solid summer towns, all the way to Canada.

“And if you do manage to see? Wouldn’t that be worse?”

“Yes.”

• • • •

I believe Cary’s birds are what killed him. People are afraid of beautiful things. They hate how they make them feel. The loss of control, the emotion that overwhelms. Cary danced, and people felt things.

Of course college was where he blossomed. Where he found the people who would love him as much as we did. Where he’d no longer be a swan among ducklings. He would have tasted that freedom and lost his mind. Every boy would have been desperate to have him, and he’d have been only too happy to be had. He’d only been away at school for six months when he was killed. He flew straight into the sun the first chance he got.

Was it a jilted boyfriend? Or some macho man who saw his show and felt things inside that he’d spent his whole life fighting? Maybe another dancer, someone who moved in clouds of smoke or schools of fish and saw Cary’s magnificence and knew she’d never be half as good, a third as beautiful?

Whatever it was, his birds were at the bottom of it.

And once I knew how, once I could connect the dots of how his gorgeous gift got him killed, I could be certain that mine, whatever it was, never would.

• • • •

We got out of the car. Stretched. Stood there, stunned, turned to stone by the staggering heat of the August sun.

“Do you know where,” Hiram asked, but didn’t know how to end the sentence. Finally he settled on, “Where we’re going?”

“I think so,” I said, but did not move.

During the semester the place would be packed, full of anxious energetic boys and girls finally out from under the thumbs and watchful eyes of mothers, fathers, small-town busybodies, churches, synagogues . . . during the semester the place would be enchanted and exciting, but now it was just as dead and frozen as the place we’d come from. I took a few breaths but couldn’t detect what Cary had told me about on the phone, the way the whole world smells different here.

• • • •

A week before he died, Cary performed. A recital, at the campus’s brand-new, hog-ugly performing arts center. That’s where Hiram and I went. It wasn’t where he died, but it was the first stop I had to make.

The performance was a smash success. Everyone fell in love with Cary then. He called us glowing, drunk on success, from a backstage pay phone. Behind him was a sea of laughter. Happiness. Mom and Dad were out when he called. Back then they still went out. We talked, my brother and I, until someone drunk on actual alcohol took the receiver out of his hand and said to me He’s got to go now, everyone wants to pet him.

Hiram and I went inside. No doors were locked to us. No one was guarding anything. We sat in the front row; we climbed up on stage; we went behind the curtain and into the dressing rooms. We found the pay phone he had called me from. I held it to my ear, listened to the dial tone, that single note of hope and possibility, that could connect me to anyone anywhere in the world, and maybe even ring up the past or the future, if I only knew the right number to dial, I might reach my brother, seventeen, in our kitchen, still considering what college to go to, still exploring the edges of his gift, and tell him never to go anywhere, to stay in the town he hated, and never do anything with the thing that made him happiest, the thing that made him the most beautiful.

I listened, and I felt: nothing. Not the love and joy and warmth of his presence; not the hate and fire and brutal metal rods of his destroyers. I hung up the phone. I pressed both hands to my face.

The ice wasn’t in the world. It was in me.

Hiram picked up a chair. He swung it at the wall, hard. It fell to the ground undamaged.

“What the heck?” I asked him.

“Thought it might be one of those stage chairs,” he said. “You know. The breakaway kind. The one they smash for dramatic effect.”

“Dramatic effect,” I said, and felt bad for being surprised, for not having imagined Hiram Raff capable of using phrases like that. “Try that bottle.”

He picked a whiskey bottle up off the table, held it by the neck and swung it at the fallen chair. Something about the swing of his arm sent a little wave of warmth into me.

The bottle broke beautifully. He stooped to pick up a shard of glass, and then giggled.

“Look!” he said, a little boy again, and handed it over. “The edges!”

They were smooth, brittle, harmless.

“Come on,” I said, and took his hand in mine, the glass shard pressed between our palms. “I know where it happened.”

• • • •

I didn’t know where it happened; only where they found him. But maybe they were the same place. And if they weren’t, maybe Hiram could show me how to trace back the steps of whoever dumped his body there.

Behind the performing arts center, we followed a paved walkway. Down a hill, around a pond. Over a bridge. To the edge of the woods, where the walkway petered out and the pavement stopped. A flimsy trail cut between the trees, and we followed that.

They’d said it was one of those spots, where kids went when they wanted to do things no one should see. Smoke dope, presumably, or drink, or have sex when the roommate would not leave and would not fall asleep. The walk wasn’t long. Whatever privacy it provided would be risky, fraught with imminent discovery by other kids coming in search of some privacy of their own.

Pine trees ringed the clearing. In February, they’d have been as green and thick and soft as they were right now. Two logs, covered in paint and carved initials, converged near the center.

The highway rumbled, not far away. The Northway; the road that could have taken him home. Dying, he would have heard the cars whispering away from him.

Hiram let go of my hand. And laughed again. “The glass—it melted.” He licked his palm. “Sugar!” he said.

I licked mine. Sugar.

Real broken glass glittered at our feet. I stepped forward, and saw: birds.

Hundreds of them. Origami cranes and taxidermied crows; cute stuffed eagles and drawings on paper. Chicken feathers. Some were soggy with rain and melted snow. Some had almost dissolved, while others looked brand new.

“Oh my god,” Hiram whispered. “Bette.”

“I know,” I said.

“People loved your brother,” he said.

“I know,” I said.

He was crying. I couldn’t cry, so how was he?

Boys don’t cry, I thought, a hateful, ugly thought I did not believe, but that somehow lived inside my head, and instantly everything made sense. Why he hated the gossip, hated the attention from the girls. Hated what Sharon Baranchik had done to him, what his brother, what his father had tried to do. Hiram had a whole beautiful universe inside his head, but the world was determined that he be nothing but a body. Something to play baseball, something to sleep with.

Just like it had done its damnedest to make me anything but a body. To make me afraid. To convince me not to dance, the way my brother had danced, or change the colors of things, the way my mother could.

Wind stirred the trees. There was no wind.

I hadn’t had a plan. Hadn’t known what to do; how I would draw Hiram’s gift out and find a way for it to do what I needed it to do. Maybe I hadn’t even believed anything at all would happen. Maybe the trip itself was what mattered, one more attempt to break the ice I saw everywhere but inside me.

I stepped closer to him. He hugged me, clutching for me the way a hurt child clutches at a parent. I hugged him back. Felt his heat. Let it in.

Our heads turned toward each other. Our noses knocked. We laughed, and then I kissed him. His muscles tightened, all up and down his body, but only for a second. He breathed out like someone letting go of a breath he’d been holding for years.

“Sugar,” he said, licking his lips, and smiled.

• • • •

We saw: everything.

• • • •

“I’m so sorry,” Hiram said-sobbed. Both our faces were red and wet. Our hands clasped. The ground was cool against our bare backs where our shirts had been pushed up, but warming. “I wish I hadn’t shown us that.”

“I wanted you to,” I said.

At least it had been silent. Hiram’s skill didn’t extend to sound. Mouths had screamed wordlessly; bones had broken with no more noise than the whoosh of the Northway.

“It’s never worked like that,” he said. “The things I’ve shown have always been . . . weird, broken, scary, disjointed. How did you . . .”

I kissed him again, and hoped it would be explanation enough. Some things are simultaneously too obvious and too ridiculous to say out loud.

“Are you . . . okay? Did it hurt?”

“Barely,” I said. “It was nice.”

“Yeah,” Hiram said, shocked into smiling. “It really was.” His hand clasped mine.

I let myself smile, too. I let myself feel. Frozen things want to melt; motionless things want to move. They felt good, the things I’d tried not to feel, the things I’d been afraid to do.

I’d watched my brother do what Hiram and I had just done. There on the ground, on a bank of February snow, with a boy he cared about. I’d seen the beauty of the act; seen his flocks of birds unfold in colors and sizes more magnificent than anything nature could make. Love wasn’t terrifying. Sex hadn’t killed him. Bad men had done that, overgrown boys pink with beer and rage over a football game that hadn’t gone the way they wanted, who’d stumbled upon something wonderful that their own ugliness saw as ugly. The other boy escaped. The other boy abandoned him.

I shut my eyes and saw my kitchen, my parents. The ice. The ice I could melt. How easy it was to make things move, when you weren’t afraid to grab hold of them.

“Watch,” I whispered to Hiram.

There were hundreds of birds in that clearing. Paper, plush, and cardboard. Gifts from people who loved my brother. Pieces of him; physical expressions of what he’d made them feel. I thought about that.

We watched those birds rise into the air. We watched them fly.

© 2018 by Sam J. Miller.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sam J. Miller is a writer and a community organizer. His debut novel The Art of Starving (HarperTeen) was one of NPR’s Best Books of 2017, and was followed by Blackfish City (Ecco Press; Orbit) in 2018. His fiction has been nominated for the Nebula, World Fantasy, Andre Norton, Crawford, and Theodore Sturgeon Awards, and have appeared in over a dozen “year’s best” anthologies, including twice in Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. He’s a graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Workshop, and a winner of the Shirley Jackson Award. He lives in New York City, and at samjmiller.com

A Brief Guide to the Seeking of Ghosts

Kat Howard | 1340 words

The business of life does not always end when life does. There are unanswered questions, half-finished conversations, and sometimes simply longings that remain: to know the other is well. To hear one more word. And so it makes sense that the living will—in time—seek out the dead, even as the dead may also haunt the living.

This guide is meant to assist those who would find their ghosts, or—in certain cases—to avoid the ghosts that should not be found.

Ghosts have many whims, and—like the living—many preferences. There are those who believe that the season or time of death influences when the ghost chooses to return. Yet it seems more likely that the things the ghost enjoyed in life are also the things the ghost will enjoy in death. Either way, it is worth the work to match the summoning to season and time, and thus increase the chances of its success.

This section addresses the seasonal visitations.

Spring

Ghosts, like plants breaking green from garden soil, tend to rise in the spring. Perhaps it is the warming air, which reminds them of life. Or perhaps it is the softening of the ground as it switches from frost-frozen to rain-drenched, which allows them to rise up out of their graves. They form like buds and burst forth, leaving scatterings of petals on the ground.

If you wish to see a ghost in spring, soak yourself in rain until your skin smells of petrichor. Open your eyes slowly, as if they are budding flowers, and let them see anew. Attend, if you can, a birth—human, animal, or even plant—spring ghosts gather at new beginnings.

Wear green.

Summer

Ghosts in summer smell of roses and of the freshness of cut grass. They buzz, soft and thick like bees, as they linger in the long daylight. They crack like lightning, stretching from ground to sky.

You may find summer ghosts hovering in the flames of citronella candles, in the smoke of campfires, and in the afterimage of fireworks. If you wish to call them to you in this season, set up a camping tent and sleeping bag. Scorch marshmallows on sticks, and leave three as offerings at the tent’s door. Sleep with nothing but the stars above your head, and look for your ghosts in their patterns.

Fall

In the fall, ghosts turn themselves red and gold and all the flame-shades of dying leaves. They let themselves spin from branches and crunch underfoot. They swell, drunk and mischievous, full of cider from fallen apples.

If you would keep their mischief from your house at this season, hang hawthorn and rowan berries above your doors. If you would invite the ghosts in, carve patterns into pumpkins and light them with candles, leave offerings of sweets, and show kindness to those who have transformed their appearance.

Winter

Ghosts in winter are of two main sorts. There are those ghosts who are cold and harsh, who settle in to whisper wrongs, who leach color and life and warmth from everything around them, who freeze up the heart’s blood until it is as heavy as tears.

Winter is also home to kinder ghosts. Ghosts that twinkle like lights against the season’s first snow, when the air is so quiet it feels almost holy. These ghosts linger in the cold chime of bells, in the bright flames of candles. They offer comfort—the softness of a blanket against a chill.

The summonings for these ghosts are the same: Using a piece of glass from a mirror snowflaked with cracks, pierce your finger, and let fall a drop of blood—red as holly berries, red as rubies, red as remembrance—to the snow while speaking the ghost’s name.

• • • •

While weather tends to be seasonal in nature, there are ghosts who seem to prefer specific types of weather to appear, regardless of the season in which this weather occurs.

Ghosts that require multiple summonings to ensure that they are wanted tend to come with the changes in the weather.

Cloudless skies

Very few ghosts enjoy the starkness of the unveiled sun, whether in the crystalline days of winter or the lushness of summer’s heat. There is something about the brightness that is perhaps too harsh for the delicacy of ghosts.

Still, there are those who venture out in this weather. They tend to be solitary ghosts, with speech as harsh as the light. Dress in all white or all black to attract them; dress in grey if you would shield yourself from the bluntness of their honesty.

Hail

Hail is inimical to ghosts. It pierces and rends them, and their fragments stick, frozen to its surface. Ghosts retreat during hailstorms, and one should never call upon a ghost in such weather. If you sense that one has the misfortune to be caught in it, do what you can to free it. Ghosts have long memories, and will remember both kindness and its lack.

Fog

Some ghosts feel better when they remain hidden. They speak only in whispers; their presence is feather-light. These ghosts prefer the fog.

If you would speak to these ghosts, keep your gaze turned away from where they are. Speak in your softest tone. Wear perfume scented with vanilla. Bring violets to scatter on the ground.

Hurricanes

Some ghosts enjoy the windward side of these storms. They crave the wildness, the chaos. They join the wind in its whirling, in its rending and tearing, until they are as gleeful as the storm.

Protect yourself from these ghosts with salt drawn in lines across the threshold. This protection will last through the storm so long as any grain of salt remains. Board up windows and doors. If these ghosts come too close, you may find that reciting the alphabet, or doing mathematical equations—things that speak to order—will cause them to go elsewhere.

Rain

There are as many kinds of ghosts as there are of rain. Gentle ghosts, that linger in the air like a rain that is almost mist, that are soft on your skin and smell like jasmine. Bold ghosts, that echo like thunder, that cause memories to be released in bursts and floods. Ghosts whose appearance is like relief in a parched land.

Rain ghosts may be summoned by turning an umbrella inside out, by leaving laundry outside to dry, or by wearing yellow.

• • • •

Other ghosts pay little to no attention to seasons or weather, but instead prefer to mark the hours of the clock with their appearances.

Twilight

Interstitial times call to ghosts, as they, too, are things not quite of one place or another. Ghosts play in the stretched out colors of sunsets, they gather in the blue hour. Twilight ghosts tend to be effervescent and brief-lived.

Offer them champagne, sonatas, pearls.

Dawn

Dawn is a time of endings and of beginnings. It is a popular time for ghosts to choose to emerge, and also a time many ghosts choose to end their presence among the living. Those who hope to summon ghosts are encourage to try at dawn, regardless of season or weather, as it is one of the most likely times for them to be found.

When summoning them, wear a key around your neck. Offer the scent of coffee, strong and bitter. Avoid the sound of alarms.

• • • •

There are times, of course, when none of this is enough. When neither season nor weather nor time will call a ghost to you. When you have stood in the rain and worn the correct colors and burnt all the necessary offerings, and the response is silence. Not every question will be answered. Not every word that should have been spoken is.

Sometimes the only thing that is left is to dress in the color of mourning, to flavor everything with salt, and to speak the word “goodbye” even when you are not certain there is anyone there to hear it.

© 2018 by Kat Howard.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kat Howard is the author of the novels Roses and Rot and An Unkindness of Magicians. Saga Press will also publish her short fiction collection, A Cathedral of Myth and Bone, in October. Her novella, The End of the Sentence, co-written with Maria Dahvana Headley, is available from Subterranean Press. Her short fiction has been published in a variety of magazines and anthologies, a finalist for the World Fantasy Award, and performed on NPR.

Elena’s Egg

Theodora Goss | 4710 words

It seemed as though Elena had been sitting in the hallway a long time. Across from her, on a wooden bench, the kind you see in old churches, sat a man in a worn gray suit holding a potted geranium on his lap. Next to him, but not too close (she was not his daughter, thought Elena) sat a girl in what looked like her Sunday best, with a blue ribbon holding her hair out of her eyes. On her lap was a kitten. She was kicking her heels methodically against the bench, but the man did not seem to notice, or at least to care. Elena gave up trying to share a look of annoyed sympathy, and instead gave an annoyed sigh. He sat looking down at his geranium, and once in a while he wiped the sweat off his brow with a crumpled handkerchief.

Elena looked down at the egg. It sat in the nest she was holding, an intricate construction of twigs and bits of string and the soft down from a bird’s breast. It was leaning a little to one side, the large chip where the baby bird had come out visible on top. It was the delicate, pale blue of a robin’s egg. Elena shifted—the wooden chair under her was uncomfortable. There were several wooden chairs on her side of the hallway, but hers was the only one occupied.

She glanced at her watch again, but it was still only two o’clock, and when she held it up to her ear, she realized that it had stopped. She was about to ask the man with the geranium what time it was when the door next to the bench opened and the secretary emerged, holding a clipboard.

“Mr. Schmidt, won’t you come in, please?”

Everything about her, from her short blonde hair to her crisp cream-colored blouse and low-heeled, immaculately polished shoes, whispered efficiency. She was young, probably just out of university, thought Elena, conscious of her own shoes, which were old and scuffed, and the wisps of hair coming out of the bun at the back of her head. She was fairly certain that she had a ladder in her stocking.

Mr. Schmidt followed the secretary into the office, and the door shut behind him.

Next, it was the girl’s turn. The kitten mewed when she lifted it to her shoulder, and it looked back at Elena with large blue eyes as the girl walked through the doorway. By leaning to her right, Elena was able to catch a glimpse of a set of French doors with a bookshelf beside it before the door closed.

Elena looked at her watch, although she knew what it would say. Two o’clock.

Finally, the door opened again. “Elena Kovaks,” the secretary said. Elena rose, holding the nest carefully in both hands, and followed.

• • • •

The office was filled with sunlight. Through the French doors, she could see a garden with a sloping lawn bordered by shrubs and flowers. Along the walls were bookshelves, filled with books and objets d’art—vases, small statues. At one end of the office was a desk, where a woman sat writing. At the other end were a sofa and two armchairs around a low table. Wherever there were no bookshelves, there were paintings of landscapes or still lifes with flowers and fruit spilling out of bowls. The room looked old, comfortable, as though it had been inhabited for a long time. And yet it was clearly a workplace as well—the desk was covered with piles of papers, and through an open door to the left, Elena could see a more utilitarian room filled with metal file cabinets. Before, Elena had been impatient; now, she wished she were still sitting in the hall.

“Mrs. Forrest?” said the secretary. “This is Elena Kovaks. She is the last for today.”

“Excellent,” said the woman at the desk. “Miss Kovaks, won’t you have a seat on the sofa? Much more comfortable than those wooden chairs. I keep asking for cushioned ones, but you know how it is. As long as they still work, why change them? After all, they’re only for the waiting area. Bureaucracies are inherently conservative and unwilling to innovate—even in the matter of cushions! But I do apologize for the wait. It’s been a busy day.”

Blinking in response to the sunlight, which seemed particularly bright after the darkness of the hallway, with its electric lights, Elena sat on the sofa. She set the nest, with its egg, carefully on the table in front of her.

“Would you like some coffee?” asked Mrs. Forrest. “I’ve already been through your file, so we should be able to proceed quickly.” She closed the file folder she had been looking through, but brought it with her as she walked across the room to where Elena was sitting. She sat in one of the armchairs across from the sofa.

“Yes, please,” said Elena.

Mrs. Forrest nodded. “Liliana, two coffees. Cream and sugar, I think?”

Elena nodded, assuming the question had been meant for her.

The coffee was very good, probably the best she had ever tasted. Without asking her, Mrs. Forrest had added milk and three lumps of sugar, which was fortunate because Elena would have been ashamed to ask for more than two. But she liked her coffee sweet.

“Now,” said Mrs. Forrest, when Elena had taken a few sips of her coffee and the secretary was sitting in the other armchair, with a notepad on her knees, her pen poised. “Tell us about the egg.” When Elena started to speak, the secretary—Liliana—started to write in the loops and whorls that Elena recognized as shorthand.

• • • •

The incident had happened when she was a child.

One day, as she and her father were walking in the park around the Sylvanian National Museum, across the street from her parents’ apartment, they found a nest under one of the linden trees. It had obviously fallen from its branch. Inside it, still intact, was a single egg. They took the nest home, and her father, who had grown up on a farm, put it under a light bulb.

Day after day, Elena watched the egg, until one day—it hatched. Oh, what a hard time they had then, just keeping that baby bird fed! Elena would go to the park with her tin pail and pick up all the insects she could find. She would even dig for worms. Then she would chop them up and feed them to the baby bird with a pair of tweezers. Even Elena’s mother helped, although she complained loudly about the mess Elena was bringing into the apartment. It was summer and Elena was not in school, or she could never have spent so much time being a mother bird. Each evening, when her father came home, he checked on the bird and said that it was growing nicely. “It’s a robin,” he told her. “Robins are lucky. Taking care of this one will bring you good luck all your life.”

Elena’s father had told her that the bird might not live, that birds were delicate. They died easily without their parents. But the bird lived. As summer passed, it grew larger and stronger—and bolder. Elena’s father constructed a cage for it out of a wooden frame covered with pantyhose. Elena went around to all the women in the apartment building, asking them for pairs of pantyhose that were so laddered they could no longer be mended. The women laughed but gave her their old pairs, and Elena’s mother sewed them together to cover the wooden frame. Despite Elena’s mother’s objections, the robin was allowed to fly around the apartment so it could strengthen its wings. It would fly to her, perch on her shoulder, and eat directly from her hand. Then, it would allow her to put it back into its cage. Afterward, Elena had to clean up whatever mess it had made.

“It thinks you’re its mother,” her father would tell her. While the robin was pecking at her fingers, she would stroke its feathers, so soft and brown, and its red breast. At dawn, it would wake her up with its chirping and twittering.

She thought she would be its mother for always, but one day, when her mother had left the windows overlooking the park open, Elena noticed a tear in the pantyhose. The cage was empty. She looked everywhere, but the robin was gone.

Elena cried and cried. Her father told her that it was for the best, that a bird belonged in the park, not in a cage. Her mother told her that she was losing patience with her, and to go play outside. Elena walked around the park aimlessly, until she heard what she thought were its particular cheeps. She looked up, and there it was—at any rate, she was convinced it was her robin. For years afterward, she was convinced there was a particular robin in the park that was hers, that came back every summer and, when it spotted her, would follow her around from tree to tree. She could see it looking down at her from among the linden leaves. But it would never fly down to take bread crumbs from her hands, although she tried to coax it.

• • • •

While Elena told this story, the secretary took notes in her notebook. Mrs. Forrest simply sat and listened, nodding once in a while. When she was finished, Mrs. Forrest opened the file folder on her lap and said, “You’ve been recommended for work in our aviary. We have a large variety of birds, some quite rare, that need to be fed and cared for. The Great Awk, I understand, has a respiratory infection and needs to be given medicine every couple of hours, and the Passenger Pigeons get lonely. There used to be so many of them, and we have only a small flock. Reading to them is often helpful. Based on your qualifications and experience, I agree with the recommendation. Liliana, can you telephone Dr. Henrik Pal and tell him that we’ve found him a new assistant? And then, can you show Miss Kovaks where to go? It’s been very nice meeting you, Miss Kovaks. I hope you enjoy your new position.” Mrs. Forrest held out her hand.

“Wait,” said Elena. “Is that it? I mean, that’s a single incident from my childhood. It happened so long ago.”

“That’s all we need,” said Mrs. Forrest. “I’ve been in this position a long time, Miss Kovaks. I pride myself on knowing where our new arrivals will be most useful, and I hope most content.”

“But you don’t know me at all,” said Elena. “You don’t know—once, I did something horrible. If you knew—”

Mrs. Forrest closed the file folder and looked at her with only a hint of impatience. The secretary sat, with her pen poised over the notebook. They waited politely.

• • • •

It happened while I was in art school, said Elena.

My father had warned me that the life of an artist is difficult—all art had to be approved by the Ministry of Culture, which chose what could be displayed, and its rules were strict. But my secondary school teacher had told me that I had talent, and I was determined to use it. While other students were kicking a football in the school courtyard or sitting on the stairs smoking cigarettes and talking about their favorite rock bands, I was drawing. I always carried my sketchbook. On the weekends, I would go to the Castle District and sketch tourists for a few hundred zlata per picture. It was how I made my spending money.

I was fortunate enough to be admitted to the Academy of Fine and Applied Arts. My first year, I was put in a drawing class with Antal Andrassi. He was a famous artist, in those days. He had designed that monument—you know the one, it used to stand beside the building everyone knew was the headquarters of the secret police. He had been given a medal by the government. He was one of the art school’s most respected teachers.

In class, he would walk around the room, a piece of black chalk in his hand. If he felt that our drawings were not good, he would correct them—with a thick line, some shading. He was not kind—“The model is leaning on that arm. It’s supporting the weight of her torso. It needs to have tension. You’ve made it look like a cooked noodle.” But he almost always made our drawings better.

At first, I thought he did not like me. “No, Elena!” he would say, standing behind me so that I had to look nervously over my shoulder. “Are you trying to insult me? Where do those shadows under her shoulder blade come from? Identify your light source. Have you listened to any of the things I’ve taught you?” I thought that I was the worst in the class, that I should quit art school. Finally, I went to his office. I could not help it—tears came to my eyes as I told him that I had lost confidence in myself, that I was considering leaving.

“Elena,” he said, leaning back in his chair, “why do you think I’m so hard on you? Harder than on anyone else in the class? It’s because you’re the most promising, the one with the most potential. If I didn’t believe in you, I wouldn’t waste my time trying to teach you, to correct your technique.” I was so startled that I did not know what to say. “You’re also quite beautiful,” he added. “I was thinking of asking you to model for me. I’m working on a mural for the Ministry of Agriculture. I need a model who looks exactly like you—with your coloring, and that expression you sometimes have, as though you were looking at distant mountains.”

I stammered that of course—if he wished to paint me, of course I would be willing to model for him. I would consider it an honor.

“Good,” he said. “Come to my studio, on Radomir Stras. Can you begin on Saturday?”

The mural was going to be in the lobby of the ministry building. He wanted me to pose for a series of preparatory sketches. On Saturday, I posed for hours with a basket on my arm. At the end of the session, my arm ached, but Antal was pleased with the results and asked me to pose for him again. I went the next Saturday, and the one after that. When I looked at his sketches, some in pencil, some in colored chalks, I could see the mural begin to take shape: In the foreground was a peasant girl, her braided hair in loops the color of wheat, holding a basket of wheat sheaves. Behind her were fields of wheat, a barn, a tractor, men harvesting—all the elements of a prosperous cooperative farm. I asked what the peasant girl was doing, exactly, but Antal said she was allegorical—she represented agriculture itself. She was looking off into the distances, toward a prosperous future.

Posing for him was not easy. When I got tired, when the basket began to weigh on my arm, I would shift, and he would get angry, telling me that I was ruining his painting, that I did not care sufficiently for art. So I would try to stay still as long as I could, despite the pain in my arms or legs. One day, I posed for him so long, and I was so tired, that I simply fell. In a moment, he was beside me, kneeling on the ground. He took me in his arms and said, “Beautiful Elena. I am a monster, torturing you like this. I never wish to hurt you, not even for my art. Tell me you’re all right, my beautiful one.” I had never expected to hear words like this from him. Tears sprang to my eyes. He smiled down at me and kissed them away. “You know that I’m in love with you, don’t you? You must have guessed, from how I look at you, how I draw you.”

Of course I had not guessed, although over the weeks of posing for him, of having him correct my drawings, I had come to think of him as the greatest man I had ever met. I still think of him that way. To be loved by him—I could not imagine a greater happiness.

“I have always longed for a muse, a woman who could represent art to me,” he said. “You inspire me, Elena—as no woman ever has.” He leaned down and kissed me.

We did not become lovers that day—but the next time I posed for him, he threw down his pencil and said, “I can no longer draw you. I’m too madly in love with you, Elena. That madness gets in the way. Either I must have you, and still this madness that is in me, or you can never pose for me again.” He looked so desperate as he said it, so filled with anger and longing and fear. I could not deny him. Of course I knew that he was married, but he had told me that he and his wife were together only for their daughter’s sake. If she had not been ill, they would have separated long ago.

I have to admit, I was jealous of all the women I saw in the sketches and paintings in his studio. They had posed for him too—had he loved them as he loved me? He assured me that they had been models, nothing more. That even if he had felt something for them, it was nothing like what he felt for me. That I was the muse, the woman, for whom his soul had always longed. Can you imagine how happy I was? How I lived to be with him, to help him fulfill the artistic destiny for which he was so clearly meant? I stopped focusing on my own art, but I did not care. I only wanted him to be content, to be as productive as he wanted to be.

After the sketches for the mural, he asked me to pose for another project—a magazine cover, he told me. I was supposed to wear a long dress and hold a staff. “What is the staff for?” I asked him. The pose did not make much sense to me. But he said it did not matter what it was for, that all I needed to do was stand still and look into the distance with that same expression, as though I were peering into the future. I had become used to posing, by this time. My legs no longer cramped, and I was able to stand still for hours at a time.

One day, while he was taking a cigarette break on the balcony and I was walking aimlessly around the studio, I found out what the staff was for. I looked through a pile of recent sketches and saw the design for the magazine cover in colored chalk. It was rough, but I could already tell what it would be: a woman in a long white dress, across which she wore a red, white, and green sash. From the staff she was holding hung a banner, on which was the old shield of Sylvania, with the crown of St. Benedek. At the top of the sketch was the name of the magazine: The White Hart. I dropped it as though I had been burned. Why was Antal designing the cover for what everyone knew was right-wing monarchist propaganda? Surely he was not a monarchist himself? I did not know what to think.

I wanted to ask him about it when he returned to the studio, but he was in one of his moods: abrupt, almost angry, wanting to return to work. I knew it was not a good time to ask him anything. But it bothered me, as I lay in my bed at night, in my parents’ apartment. I told myself that I would go ask him, that surely he would have a reasonable explanation. I had never gone to his studio unless he asked me, but he loved me—surely he wouldn’t mind.

The next day, a Sunday, I went.

Another tenant was going in as I arrived at the building, so I did not need to ring for Antal to let me in. I walked up the three flights of stairs to the studio. I paused at the top—those three flights always put me out of breath, although with his long legs he ran up them easily, despite his smoking.

The door of the studio had swung open several centimeters: It was old, and needed a new bolt. Through it I could hear two voices. One was his. The other was a woman’s.

“Who is she?” the woman asked, angrily. “Another one of your students? I promise you, Antal, if I find you’ve slept with her, I will leave you. I can’t stand it anymore. I can’t stand the way you treat me—or the way you treat them!”

“Marta, please,” he said. “How can you think I would want anyone but you? You’re my muse, the woman for whom my soul has always longed. If I lost you, I would be a dead man. I would throw myself off the Liberty Bridge. Don’t you know that I love you, and only you?”

I could not listen anymore. I ran down the stairs, not caring whether they heard the clatter of my heels. I was so hurt, so angry. At him, and at her, for the words he had said to her, for being the women he had said them to. I wanted to hurt him somehow, but I felt so powerless. I wandered around the streets, not caring where I was going, until I came to the Danube. There was the Liberty Bridge, commemorating the liberation of Sylvania from the Germans, and for a moment I considered throwing myself off it, as he had said he would if she left him. I even looked down over the railing into the swirling green waters. But the impulse passed. Instead, I walked along the river for hours, with my arms wrapped around me as though holding myself together, trying to wipe away the tears that kept streaming down my face.

Finally, I thought, I can’t just keep walking. I must go home. And that was when I saw it: his famous statue, in front of the building everyone knew was the headquarters of the secret police. It was the statue of a woman, larger than life, arms raised to the sky. Was it her—was she the one who had modeled for it? I wondered what it was an allegory of.

All those women, all those sketches, always representing something other than themselves.

I walked into that building and denounced Antal as a monarchist sympathizer.

• • • •

Elena sat silent, looking down at her hands. Mrs. Forrest waited.

“He was more than a sympathizer; he was one of the leading members of the monarchist party. When they searched his studio, they found magazines, letters, lists of names. He was so stupid, so confident he would not be caught, that he had hidden them under the floorboards—just where the secret police would look. First, he was made to denounce the other members of the organization. And then, he was sent away. Not just him—his wife Marta, even the little girl. They said his wife was complicit because she had posed for some of the covers. I wonder if she knew what they were for . . .”

Again she paused. Then, she looked up and said, “I could not draw after that. I left school, went to work in a factory like my father. When my supervisor learned that I had been in an art program, he asked me to design a logo for a shampoo. He liked the logo I created, and after that, I was moved to the unit that designed product labels. I have made packaging for chocolate bars, cigarettes, face cream. When the political system changed after the fall of the People’s Republic, that factory closed, and I went to work for a German company with an office in Karelstad. There, I created advertising campaigns. That is what I do—or what I did, until I retired last year. Once the files became available, I was able to find out what had happened to them. The girl died that winter—she had a heart condition, and she could not survive the cold and privation of the prison camp. Her mother hanged herself shortly after. I was not able to find out what had happened to Antal. His file was missing.”

Elena looked at Mrs. Forrest. “So, you see . . .” She did not finish the sentence, but seemed to be waiting.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Forrest finally. “Thank you for what has been an interesting and informative story. I’m sure the events you describe must have caused you much grief. Now, if you follow Liliana, she will show you the way to the aviary.”

“Come with me, Miss Kovaks,” said Liliana, rising.

Elena rose. She felt tired and bewildered. Was that it, was that all there was to it? Not knowing what else to do, she followed the secretary to the French doors. Liliana opened them and pointed down the sloping lawn.

“Just follow the path,” said Liliana. And there it was, at the bottom of a lawn: a path bordered with flowers, winding off into the distance. “It will take you to the right place. When you get there, tell Dr. Pal that Mrs. Forrest sent you. He was a professor of biology at Morek University, specializing in avian species. He will know where you would be most useful. “

Elena stepped outside, into the sunlight, and followed the path.

• • • •

Mrs. Forrest sighed and took off her shoes. It had been a long day.

“Why do they always want us to punish them?” asked Liliana.

“Because they don’t realize how effectively they do it themselves,” said Mrs. Forrest. “I’m curious: Could you bring me the files for the Andrassis?”

“I’ve already pulled them,” said Liliana. “Here is the wife, Marta, and the daughter, Judit. Antal’s is not yet closed.”

“And?” said Mrs. Forrest.

Liliana opened the file folders on her lap, glanced through them quickly, and said in her efficient secretary’s voice, “Marta and Judit Andrassi arrived together. They were sent to the children’s section. She had been a primary school teacher, so she worked with the children while she was here. When Judit was old enough, they were sent on. There are pictures of a party that was given for them, with chocolate and raspberry cake. Everyone was sad to see them go.”

“And Antal?”

“He escaped from the prison camp. That explains why his file was missing and Miss Kovaks was not able to find it: Who would want to admit that a prisoner had escaped? But of course our files are complete. He made his way to England, where he took a different name. He has become a celebrated artist, part of the Trash Art movement. He has married twice since.” Liliana looked up at Mrs. Forrest. “That doesn’t seem fair.”

“We are not in the business of justice, my dear,” said Mrs. Forrest. “I’m sure we’ll encounter Antal Andrassi eventually, and I’m sure he’ll tell us his story. But not, I hope, for a long time. Would you mind putting away the nest before you go?”

“Of course, Mrs. Forrest,” said Liliana, rising. “I’ll put it on one of the back shelves. Anything else?”

“No, thank you,” said Mrs. Forrest. She poured herself another cup of coffee, leaned back into the armchair, and looked out into the garden, where the roses were blooming. As they always were.

© 2013 by Theodora Goss. Originally published in Exotic Gothic V, edited by edited by Danel Olson. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Theodora Goss is the author of the novels The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter (which was a finalist for the Nebula and World Fantasy awards) and European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman. Her other publications include the short story collection In the Forest of Forgetting (2006); Interfictions (2007), a short story anthology co-edited with Delia Sherman; Voices from Fairyland (2008), a poetry anthology with critical essays and a selection of her own poems; The Thorn and the Blossom (2012), a novella in a two-sided accordion format; and the poetry collection Songs for Ophelia (2014). Her work has been translated into ten languages, including French, Japanese, and Turkish. She has been a finalist for the Nebula, Crawford, Locus, Seiun, and Mythopoeic Awards, and on the Tiptree Award Honor List. Her short story “Singing of Mount Abora” (2007) won the World Fantasy Award. She teaches literature and writing at Boston University and in the Stonecoast MFA Program.

The Super Ultra Duchess of Fedora Forest

Charlie Jane Anders | 4000 words

There is a perfect valley, nestled near the foot of the Sherbet Mountains and bordered by the River of Middling Ideas. It’s just a two-day ride away from the Lazy Geyser, which grants good luck to anyone who throws a coin in its path at the very moment when it finally gets around to erupting. There, in that valley, in the shelter of the fedora trees, is the most splendid place in the whole world to make your home.

Once, that valley was home to a small cottage, in which there lived a mouse, a bird, and a sausage. They were the best of friends, with the perfect partnership.

Every day, the bird would fly into the forest and collect wood. The mouse would carry in water from the well, make a fire, and set the table. And then the sausage would cook their dinner, slithering around in the fry pan to coat it with grease for their vegetables or grains.

The sausage had fled the Republic of Breakfast Meats, during one of High Commodore Gammon’s occasional campaigns to purge the realm of improper “meatizens.” (It usually started out with the Canadian bacon, which wasn’t even proper bacon at all, and then spread to those accursed chicken-fried steaks, and then turned into just a general massacre.) The sausage heard the sounds of trucks and loudspeakers, and barely managed to pack up her few precious belongings (such as an MP3 player that contained all of her beloved EDM tunes, which she loved to listen to and dream of becoming a DJ someday).

The sausage had barely made it through the border from the Republic of Breakfast Meats to the Federation of Circus Animals, thanks to some help from a kindly blood pudding who forged some traveling papers for the sausage. Once in the land of Circus Animals, the sausage had found shelter in a trailer with a friendly balloon elephant, who was best friends with an actual elephant. (“People can never tell us apart,” the balloon elephant had said, making a squeaky-squocky noise with his laughter. The flesh-and-blood elephant had just snorted through her trunk.) From there, the sausage had traveled south, skirting the edge of the Monster Truck Preserve.

Once, this land had been home to men and women. People had built the houses and roads, and they had made places for all the creatures of the forest and all the food items of the table. Even the balloon animals and monster trucks had known exactly where they belonged. That had been paradise, and now the men and women were gone, and everyone lived in a fallen state.

That, at least, was what the cartoon Blanketsaurus standing on a sardine crate was saying, on the day when the sausage had met the bird and the mouse. The Blanketsaurus, whose skin was a beautiful soft fluffy wool-cotton blend, had stood facing a crowd of every kind of person you could imagine, in the market square of the town of Zay!. “We’re just all jacked up,” the Blanketsaurus insisted. “Our shiz is a mess, brothers and sisters and others. We can’t ever even have any purpose at all without the humans.”

The sausage had made a dismissive noise, like a sausage makes when she’s getting a bit steamed. “Who needs humans?” she had whispered. “I never even saw a human. Never saw a need for one, neither.”

That was when the mouse had spoken up. “I just don’t know. I sometimes have the feeling that my life has no organizing principle, ya know? I’m living with a bird, in this cottage in the valley, and we’re just playing house. What are we even doing with our lives? Some days, I just want a human to chase me into the wainscoting. And I don’t even know what a wainscoting is.”

“A wainscoting is a sort of musical instrument,” according to a nearby cactus, who was kind of a know-it-all. “It plays mournful sounds, like the wind on a lonely, moonless night.”

“We don’t need any crunking humans,” the sausage had insisted. “We don’t need anybody besides one another. We can make our own rules. You and that bird can figure it out, all on your own.” And the more the mouse had told the sausage about her life with the bird, the more the sausage had piped up with ideas about how to make it work, and how they could get everything set up just right.

So that was how the sausage ended up living with the mouse and the bird, and the three of them had a perfect system. They were able to salvage enough valuable artifacts of the former human world to sell in the town of Zay!, and soon they had amassed a great many fine possessions. Meanwhile, the sausage finally had a place to practice her DJing, and she started spinning at some of the smaller raves and warehouse parties, over near Confetti Canyon. Her DJ rig included a big mic, with various cool effects, and a built-in speaker on wheels, for outdoor parties.

For years, the mouse, the bird, and the sausage lived merrily together. In the evenings, they played video games and worked on their dance routines. The mouse, who had grown up in a barn full of serious square dancers, was learning to throw it down. (The mouse hailed from a farm many miles away, and she always told the bird and the sausage that if you wanted to see serious drudgery, try farm work. Farms were like a chore wheel with a million spokes, man.)

“You guys are the best friends I’ve ever known, man,” the bird said to the mouse and the sausage one night, when they were kind of crunked up on aromatic bark that the bird had brought back from the town market earlier that day. “I’m serious. I never really felt like I belonged with the other birds. But you guys, you are my sisters. I never thought I would find my place in the world with a mouse and a sausage.” The bird was perched on his usual chair back but kept wobbling.

“You too, absolutely,” the mouse said, wrinkling her nose. “I feel like I just always had a sausage-and-bird-shaped hole in my life, and I never even knew.”

“Awww, I love you guys,” the sausage said, greasy tears rolling down her face.

Nobody knew what kind of bird the bird was. He was just “a bird.” People would sometimes try to identify his actual species: like, maybe he was a bluebird because his wings were kind of blue, or maybe he was a robin because his breast was reddish. But the bird would get grumpy whenever anybody tried to label him. Why wasn’t it enough just to be a bird? One reason why he liked being the only bird in the neighborhood was because you could ask, “Hey, where’s the bird?” and everybody would know you were talking about him.

So they went on: the bird fetching wood, the mouse fetching water and setting the table, the sausage making the food and seasoning it with her body. A perfect system!

A few times a month, the bird, the mouse, and the sausage would venture into the town to sell their wares (and to get more DJ gigs lined up for the sausage). They knew everyone: all the scrap dealers, and farmers’ market stall keepers, and truck whisperers, and sno-cone motivational speakers. Everybody had a friendly word for their little makeshift family.

Except, as time went by, they kept hearing whispers. “Things are changing,” said this one scrap-metal dealer, who was a big roast turkey leg. “Good old High Commodore Gammon from the land of Breakfast Meats signed a treaty with Grand Marshal Ruffles from the Circus Animal country, and they’ve both entered into a confederation with the Dandelion Lady.”

“What does that mean?” the bird asked, with a toss of his wings.

“It means, be careful about traveling if you don’t have identity papers and letters of transit,” said the turkey leg, quivering with indignation. “It means, honest businesspeople like myself get to have our goods searched and seized for no reason, unless we pay bribes to the border guards. It means that they’re forming an army and preparing to go to war against the Insect Principality. I would just keep your heads down.”

“But why?” the mouse asked.

“It makes no sense,” the sausage said. “People just want to have a simple life. Gammon should stick to what he’s good at, arresting good innocent salami slices for being too Continental a breakfast item.”

A month or two after that, the sausage saw the big vermilion Blanketsaurus again, once again addressing the townsfolk of Zay!. Only this time, the Blanketsaurus had a fancy uniform with big epaulettes, and his title was Admiral Blanketsaurus. (There was no ocean anywhere nearby, even if you counted the Root Beer Sea, but the Blanketsaurus explained painstakingly that the word “admiral” meant that you had lots and lots of secret admirers.) And now, the Blanketsaurus was accompanied by a few dozen people, all of them wearing uniforms as well.

“Brothers, sisters, and others,” the Blanketsaurus told the crowd in the town square. “Our lives were empty and without purpose. Our creators were gone, and we were living in their world without them. The human race decided to endow a great many things and creatures with higher awareness, and then they were wiped out by a flu virus that had gotten a PhD in linguistics. As a result, we were left behind, possessing consciousness without context. But now, at last, we can prove ourselves worthy of our heritage. We can re-create civilization!”

The Blanketsaurus wanted everyone to swear loyalty to the Confederation and to its leaders, like High Commodore Gammon and the Dandelion Lady. And if you originally hailed from one of the member states—like, say, the land of Breakfast Meats—you would be required to travel home and register there. This was a mere bureaucratic trifle, after which you would be free to carry on as before.

The sausage heard this and nearly cooked in her skin. There was no way she was ever going home, to be subject to the cruel whims of Gammon and his sort. She slipped away while everyone else was cheering for the new, more organized government, and ran home.

“I just don’t get it,” said the mouse, making a fire and setting the table for their dinner as usual. “I mean, why should anybody care what we do with our lives? Isn’t the whole point that everybody gets to live happily ever after in our own way?”

“Well,” said the bird, “they’re just trying to do the same thing we’re doing here, man. We’ve got our perfect civilized setup, right? Each of us has our tasks. The wood gathering, the water, the cooking—we have an order to everything. They just want the same kind of thing, on a larger scale. Right?”

“It’s not the same thing,” said the mouse.

“We’re a family,” said the sausage.

“Sure, sure,” said the bird. But his feathery brow wrinkled a little bit.

A couple of weeks passed, and they all forgot about Blanketsaurus and about the conversation they’d had afterward. Until one day, the bird came home from fetching wood, and his wings were fluttering with anger. He scratched at his chair back as he glowered at his two friends. “It’s an honest disgrace,” the bird grumbled.

“What’s wrong?” asked the mouse, wide-eyed.

The bird kept just muttering and glaring, until he finally explained. When he was out in the woods, he’d met up with another bird who lived a few miles away and had come over here to flutter around and hunt for gumdrops. You know, bird stuff. And the bird—our bird—had started bragging about his situation, and how good he had it, with his friends the mouse and the sausage. They had everything locked down. Everybody had a job to do, and it all ran smooth as butter. And then they played video games and danced to EDM!

But the other bird just fluffed his bright tail feathers and said that it sounded as though the bird was being straight-up taken for a ride. After all, the bird had the toughest job of the three of them. He had to go into the forest and collect the wood, and carry it all the way back to the cottage. Meanwhile, the mouse only had to carry some water and set the table, and a few other chores, and then she could just lounge around. The sausage just had to climb into the pan for a little while and season it. Of course they were happy: They’d suckered the bird into doing all the real work! “I’m glad I don’t have to get bossed around by a rodent and a piece of meat,” said the other bird with a chortle, before flying away.

Now the bird was back at home, spitting mad at his friends. “You think I’m just a chump,” he squawked. “You think you can just treat me like your fool forever. You guys just loaf around here, putting on your fancy airs, while I’m out there dragging wood in from the forest. It’s exploitation, is what it is.”

“But, I mean, you’ve never complained before,” said the mouse, her fur standing on end.

“And that’s how you knew I was a sucker!”

The mouse and the sausage tried to reason with the bird, pointing out that each of them had the task that she or he was most suited for. They weren’t trying to exploit anybody, just use their shared resources in the best possible way. And so on.

But the bird was having none of it. He kept insisting that the free lunch was over, and it was about time they shared the workload more equally.

“What do you have in mind?” the sausage asked, trembling with nervousness, but also with the fear that she had lost her friend forever.

“How about we trade jobs tomorrow?”

So it was that the sausage went out to the forest to fetch wood, in spite of all her protests. And meanwhile, the bird would get the easy job of fetching water and setting everything up, while the mouse threw herself into the hot frying pan to get it greased up. If this worked out as it should, the bird had said, maybe they could have a chore wheel from now on.

The sausage felt naked and exposed, moving through the trees with the delicate marbling under her skin visible in the sunlight filtering through the big hats above. She tried to hum a David Guetta song to steady her nerves, but every sound in the woods made her jump. The fear, the uncertainty, were like a lump of gristle in her brain. And meanwhile, she kept arguing with the bird in her head, coming up with more and more reasons why this was unfair and a dreadful mistake, and surely the bird had to see that the sausage was much too delicate to carry wood every day, or even once every three days.

The sausage got so worked up, arguing with the bird in her mind, that she didn’t hear the dog coming up behind her until its hot breath and slobbery tongue were right behind her. She tried to run, but the dog’s jaws closed around her.

“Hey,” the sausage protested weakly, “let me go.”

The dog did let go of her for a moment, just so he could talk. “You’re a mighty juicy sausage,” he whuffed. “But you’re a long way from the Breakfast Meats country. I don’t suppose you have any valid travel papers?”

“Uh—” The sausage fumbled around in her pockets. “I do, I do. I have some right here.”

And she produced the papers that the blood pudding had made for her, so long ago. The dog picked them up in his front paws and inspected them. Now that she wasn’t in the dog’s mouth, she could see that he was a big brown hound, like a hunting dog, with a slobbery mouth and flat ears.

“Hmmm,” the dog said. “This is certainly most interesting. But it’s clearly a forgery. You see this smudging around the great seal of High Commodore Gammon, here? And also, even if this was real, it’s no longer valid. You would have had to return to your home and get updated papers for the Confederation. In any case, you’re carrying forged papers, and thus you are free booty.” He leaned his head in a graceful movement and scooped the sausage up again.

The shout came from behind the sausage: “Let go of my friend!”

The sausage would never know why the bird came looking for her. Maybe the bird felt guilty? Or maybe he just wanted to come and gloat. Either way, he arrived just in time to see the dog carrying her away, and try to intervene.

“Oh, hi.” The dog let the sausage go again so he could address the bird. “Unfortunately, your friend here is carrying forged letters. Which is like ten kinds of a crime. So I was about to carry her off and eat her, maybe not in that order.”

“That’s . . . that’s barbaric!” The bird’s wings shook with outrage, and his feet scraped the forest dirt. “You can’t go around eating people!”

“Civilization has certain rules,” the dog growled. “You break them, you get eaten. This isn’t up to me. I have to follow the same rules as everybody else.”

“You don’t have to eat anybody. That’s not in any rules,” the sausage said, gaining a bit of courage from having her friend there by her side.

“That’s true,” the dog said. “I mean, I could take her all the way back to the Republic of Breakfast Meats, where they would execute her. But that’s a lot of bother, and the end result is the same. And I can tell just by smelling her that she’s got bits of fennel and wild boar in her. She’s going to be delicious.”

“But,” the bird said. “But—but—we’re friends with the Super Ultra Duchess of the Fedora Forest! She has a great army and immense power. She’ll be mega pissed if you kill our friend here. She’ll probably hunt you down and make an example of you.”

“What?” the dog said. “What the hell are you talking about?”

The sausage was about to say the exact same thing as the dog. But when she glanced at the bird, he rolled his eyes and poked forward with his beak, as if to say, Just work with me here.

So the sausage chimed in. “Yes! The Super Ultra Duchess. You didn’t even know this forest had its own ruler, did you? And we’re under her protection. She’s so powerful, even the Confederacy leaves her alone.”

“I’ve never heard of any Super Ultra Duchess,” the dog grumbled, “and I’m on all the message boards.”

“Well, you obviously don’t come to the Fedora Forest too often,” the sausage said huffily.

“In fact,” said the bird, “I think I saw her just a little while ago.” He was gesturing at someone whom the sausage couldn’t see, and she realized that their friend, the mouse, must be someplace nearby. The bird kept talking, trying to stall the dog. “She makes all the rules hereabouts, and in fact, you better watch out, because I think you’re violating a bunch of her regulations and ordinances and statutes. For reals.”

“I don’t know.” The dog sniffed the air. “I think I would have smelled it if there was any such authority around here. Authority has a very distinct scent.”

“I’m pretty sure she’s right around here,” the bird said, looking around in a panic.

“This is your last warning,” the sausage said, with zero conviction.

“Nah,” the dog said. “I think I’m going to eat this sausage now, and then there won’t be any evidence left anyway.”

He bent his head to scoop the sausage up in his jaws, ready to gobble her up once and for all.

“WHO DARES?” came a thundering voice through the forest.

The dog dropped the sausage, his tail going between his legs by some instinct.

“UNMOUTH MY SUBJECT,” said the voice. And the source of the voice came close enough for the sausage to see. It was the mouse, riding on top of the sausage’s mobile DJ rig, using the microphone on its highest reverb setting. The mouse had found a big mushroom, which she was using as a hat, and had covered herself and the DJ rig with a big velvety red blanket.

“Hey,” the dog said, with a bit of a whimper in his voice. “I found her. She had forged papers. She’s free booty, man.”

“YOURS IS THE BOOTY THAT WILL BE FREE,” said the mouse, “IF YOU MOLEST MY SUBJECT. GO NOW! BEFORE I BRING MY MIGHTY ARMIES DOWN UPON YOU.”

The dog hesitated one moment longer, but the mouse bellowed, “GO!” He turned his lowered tail and ran off into the forest with his legs flailing. The sausage was so amazed and relieved, she fell on her back, wobbling as if she was being grilled.

“That was a near thing,” the sausage said.

“That dog will be back, I bet,” said the mouse, disentangling herself from the DJ rig, the mushroom, and the blanket.

“We’ll just have to make the Super Ultra Duchess more convincing next time,” said the bird. “We’ll all have to work together on it, since she’s like our insurance policy.”

“Ow.” The mouse cringed as it exposed its patchy fur to the open air. “I am actually in pain, all over my whole body. I tried to get into the hot frying pan to season the food with my body, and my fur did not like it at all. That’s why I was here in the woods when that dog attacked you. I came here to ask you for advice on what I was doing wrong. I burned my poor feet, so I had to ride here on your DJ rig, and it’s lucky that I did, too.”

“There’s a whole art to wriggling around in a frying pan and seasoning it with your body,” the sausage said, still expanding with relief.

“Really?” the mouse said.

“No, not really,” the sausage said, with an exasperated laugh. “You just have to be a sausage, dude.”

“Oh,” the bird said. “That actually makes total sense.”

After that, they carried on more or less as they had before. Except that now, they had a house meeting once a week or so, just to make sure they were all happy with the arrangement of the jobs. Some days, the bird skipped fetching wood and went flying off to look for cool stuff that they could sell to the scrap merchants in town. The sausage’s DJ gigs started bringing in enough money that they could hire some part-time help. The mouse got better at pretending to be a Super Ultra Duchess, until they finally received an embossed invitation to join the Confederacy. They framed the invite and put it on the mantelpiece, over their PlayStation’s big screen.

“It just proves,” said the bird, who would not stop extolling his own cleverness for a minute, “anybody can be a big deal, if they just have a posse.”

“Yeah,” the mouse said, curling up between her friends. “It just makes me wonder. Why doesn’t everybody just invent their own nation?”

“I think maybe they do,” said the sausage. They were playing a side-scrolling shooter, and the sausage had just gotten to the Final Boss, so nobody talked for a while after that. Until it was time to climb into the frying pan and make dinner.

© 2016 by Charlie Jane Anders. Originally published in The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales, edited by Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Charlie Jane Anders is the author of All the Birds in the Sky, which won the Nebula, Locus and Crawford Awards. Her short fiction has appeared in Wired, Tor.com, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Tin House, ZYZZYVA, The McSweeney’s Joke Book of Book Jokes, and elsewhere. Her story “Six Months Three Days” won a Hugo Award, “Don’t Press Charges and I Won’t Sue” won the Sturgeon Award, and she’s been reprinted twice in Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. She runs the long-running Writers With Drinks reading series in San Francisco and used to spout off on io9.com. She won the Emperor Norton Award for “extraordinary invention and creativity unhindered by the constraints of paltry reason.”

The Girl with the Sun in Her Head

Jeremiah Tolbert | 4050 words

Emelia’s home is in a city where only children are allowed to draw graffiti on the crumbling walls. The old bricks and stones are covered in crude pictographs and stick figures, smoking chimney houses and bicycles with four wheels and two seats. Chalk is a penny apiece, any color to be had. A little old lady with gnarled fingers and crooked eyes sells the sticks out of cigar boxes on street corners, even in the rain.

Emelia lives with her father and twin brothers, Blanco and Negro. Negro is very nice to Emelia and buys her sweets. Blanco steals and hides them underneath his mattress. In the spring, the flies are drawn to the sugar, and Blanco spends the night swatting at them without much success. The flies never bother Emelia or Negro, or their father who sleeps in the rocking chair in the living room beside the fireplace. Ever since robbers came down the chimney to steal and carried away Emelia’s mother instead, her father has stood watch over the sooty tunnel. He lost his job years ago.

Negro and Blanco work on the waterfront unloading exotic goods from far away lands. When no one is looking, Blanco stashes a bolt of spun silk or a bag of spices under his shirt. He sells these things on the underground market and uses the money to buy dirty comic books and tickets to the movies for his girlfriend, a prostitute twice his age named Consuela. Sometimes, Blanco brings Consuela home with him and takes her into the bedroom.

To Emelia, Consuela is a sour-smelling monster with long, red-painted talons and ragged dresses in garish colors. Her skin seems permanently colored by the red glare of the lantern that hangs from her window above the cobblestone streets.

When Consuela comes to visit, Emelia takes a penny from her hiding place in the flour jar below the kitchen sink and runs down the stone steps from her family’s apartment, down the streets between buildings built from blocks of pink and gray corals, through the green-grassed Tommy-Gaul Park and past the dolphins dancing fountain, until she reaches the little lady with the gnarled knuckles and the box full of chalks.

“I will take one stick of yellow,” she says to the lady, and the lady nods and grins, staring over Emelia’s shoulder down the street and out over the endless waves of water. The old woman is blind, but somehow she can feel the colors of the chalks through her weathered fingers. Many children have tried to steal from the chalk seller, but she can always hear them sneaking up, no matter how soft their footsteps.

Emelia always buys her chalk, and always buys yellow. When the woman has no more yellow, Emelia comes back another day, and another, until finally the yellow is there again. Nobody, especially not Emelia, knows where the woman gets her chalk. The art store that caters to the rich and lonely artists who rent small rooms in the hotels along the waterfront sells its chalk for three times the price, sometimes more.

Once, Consuela brought Emelia a piece of blue chalk. “When I was a little girl, I would draw on the walls,” Consuela said. “I drew the waves of the ocean, and tall masts disappearing over the horizon.” Emelia said nothing. She gave the chalk to Mariana, the little girl who lived next door. Consuela never gave Emelia anything again.

“Here’s your yellow, dear,” says the chalk seller with a toothless smile. The stick of chalk is perfectly round and as long as Emelia’s finger, but brittle and frail. Emelia cups the palm of her hand, and the chalk seller lets the stick roll gently off her fingertips and into Emelia’s hand.

Emelia closes her hand carefully and then runs, pretending that monsters from the sewers have slunk out of the foul stink and wish to make her their princess. She runs around the bend, past the bakery and the smells of fresh croissants and the window full of ginger cookies, around the men playing obscure games of dice and checkered board games on the street corner outside the tannery, over the wall of the cemetery, past the collapsing church with more holes in the roof than statues of saints within, and down the alleyway, always uphill, always higher into the city and away from the smell of brine and drying fish, until she stops, huffing and holding her stretched sides.

When she looks up, she is surrounded by shadowy streets lined by stuccoed walls and dark windows. These nicer neighborhoods pay their children to wash the walls each day, unlike her part of the city where the graffiti piles up and piles up, and only the rain ever washes the walls clean.

Here she sets to work, chalk piece held gently in her hand, pressing ever so softly against the stucco. She draws in quick and furtive motions, only half looking at the chalk. Mostly she looks above and below and all around, like a mouse in the open, afraid of getting caught. Her work is not against the law but the people in this neighborhood would like it to be. The children are paid to clean the walls, but they’re paid even better to keep the children from the streets below away. Emelia knows that they play games in the forest after their lunches, but sometimes they come home early, especially when someone scrapes a knee or twists an ankle.

She sketches quick circles that are nearly perfect. Her circles can and have made the artists on the waterfront weep when they stumble across them, knowing because of the law that they must be the work of a child. She throws circles from her quick wrists, and then fast, perfectly straight lines radiating out from the circle.

In the middle of drawing, she switches hands, and without thinking, wipes away the wet, sweat-soaked yellow chalk across the front of her white dress. She leans in so close that she can see the fine gritty pattern of the stucco, even in the shadow of the buildings with the sky-sun obscured. She draws his face, each time differently, but the features are almost always the same. It is only the expressions that change.

This time, Emelia draws him smiling, an expression like that of St. Lucius on the statue she found locked away in the cellar of the church, among spare pews and boxes of books filled with hymns that she had never heard sung in all her life. It was a knowing smile, a smile that said the wearer held a secret mystery within.

She draws the sun’s face as if it were a middle-aged man, his eyes lined with wrinkles, his lips full and plump, with the nose of hawk, sharp and beaked, but bent a little to the left. When she finishes, the chalk stick is little more than a nub, barely able to be held between her tiny fingers and touch the wall at the same time. She tosses the nub to the ground, grinds it under her bare feet, and then runs as if the harpies from the mountain have come to take her for their stew.

On this afternoon in the late spring when the winds are changing direction and windows are left open more often in the evenings to catch the sea breeze, she glances back at a sound from an alley as she passes and catches a glimpse of a long-necked aristocratic animal, a cat of indeterminable grace and wisdom, as it leaps from a windowsill and down into the street. When she turns back to the direction she is running, it is too late; she runs headlong into the black-coated figure of a man who eyes are shocked, his mouth an O of surprise. Then the collision, and all the bones in Emelia’s small body are jarred and she falls, as does the man in the black coat. They land in a jumbled heap on the warm, smooth stones below.

Emelia lies for a moment, shocked by the impact, and surprised at the coolness of the black cloth beneath her. The coat should be hot and uncomfortable, but instead the touch is soothing, like a damp rag across her forehead. She remembers suffering from a fever, a cool cloth held by an almost forgotten mother who had almond eyes and straight black hair. Black like the man’s coat. She lies motionless and holds her breath.

The man groans and stirs, then freezes when he realizes that Emelia does not move. Gently, he slips out from underneath her, and Emelia could swear that he becomes as thin as a shadow and half as there when he does so. She doesn’t move from the stones and keeps her eyes looking downward. She pretends to be dead.

“Little miss, please get up,” the man whispers. His voice reminds her of the taste of grapes, wet and tart, the consonants like small pops in her ears. She cannot help but roll over to look up at him, even though she is ashamed for her inattention. He offers her a hand twice the size of hers. It is covered in thin black lines that swirl and coil back on themselves. A labyrinth of lines crisscrosses his hand, and her gaze is trapped on the path, chasing an exit that isn’t there.

He coughs politely, and she looks up, the spell broken. He wears a broad hat made of green felt with a peacock feather in the band. Emelia has never seen a peacock feather so close before. Staring at the feather and the delicate whorls of color, she takes his hand, and he lifts her effortlessly to her feet.

“I—I’m sorry, master, I should have been looking where I was going,” she says, her voice cracking like dropped china. She doesn’t want to cry, but the man is being too nice. If she ran into a man on the waterfront, he would whip her silly for her stupidity.

“What thing scares you so that you run like a frightened rabbit?” he asks in his grape voice. His eyes are as green as his hat, and his hair is white, though his face looks young and unwrinkled.

“Nothing, sir. I always run this fast,” she answers.

He shakes his head. “You run as if something chases you. I know about such things, you see.”

“I pretend that things chase me, so that I run faster. Each time, I run a little faster. One day, I will run faster than the setting sun, and then I will see him in his slumber.”

“Oh ho,” the man says. “You wish to see the sun resting his head upon his bed? That is an odd thing for a child to wish.”

She holds her head low. “I’m sorry, master.”

“It is nothing to be sorry for,” he says, smiling and reaching out to tilt her head. His eyes are the color of seaweed, she thinks. “Maybe you will, one day.”

“Thank you, master,” she says, and then dodges past him, her heart fluttering, and this time she runs, afraid that the strange man in the black coat and the green hat will follow her. When she looks back, he is not, and part of her is sad, but she does not know why.

• • • •

The next day, a fierce storm blows in from the sea, and Blanco and Negro stay home. They sit in the chairs from the kitchen table beside their father and listen to the wailing wind, getting up only occasionally to refasten a shutter. Emelia lies on her bed and stares at the ceiling. She wonders if the sun takes naps on days where the rain clouds blanket the earth. What else would he do, besides nap or stare at the clouds below? When he wakes up, he glares and frowns, and the clouds boil away, she thinks.

When Emelia was too little to walk, she remembers being left in the park on a blanket under a clear blue sky with the sun in his noon perch. She remembers staring deeply at the yellow orb until it became all that she could see. All she could see for weeks afterwards was the sun’s face, his curious half-smile and his sad eyes. It does not seem strange to her that she could remember things from when she was so young. She remembers more.

Doctors feared she had gone blind, and her mother sobbed every night above her cradle; her mother blamed herself. They took Emelia to see the old healer who lives in the abandoned lighthouse where the rocks used to be until heavy man-o-wars came and blasted them away with cannons and made the waters safe. She was blessed in the church with cool water sprinkled on her brow. A few weeks later, her sight slowly drifted back, but the image of the sun stayed. He was always there, except at night or on a cloudy day.

She wonders often what the sun is thinking, to accompany his odd facial expressions, but everyone knows that the sun cannot speak to people. So this she sets aside, and does not allow it to trouble her. When the sun sets, he is no longer in her mind, no longer her ever-present and silent companion. Where does he go, and most importantly, what look rests upon his face while he sleeps in the dark night’s sky?

And so she runs every day, from home to the little school when the bells ring and the teacher is sober, to church on Sundays, to take her brothers lunch in the afternoons, and on her chalking excursions up the hill and down the rich streets.

• • • •

It rains for three days after she met the man in the green hat. In the rain, the sun is away from her mind as it is at night, and she grows lonely for the sight of his kind face. The sun is never fierce to her, not even in the hottest days of summer; in fact, he seems most joyous on those days, more than any other.

Finally, she wakes with the sunrise on the fourth day, and the sun beams across the sea of her city into the open window of her bedroom. Roosters call from below in the streets. The sun is happy, but weary and exhausted. Emelia smiles; she also feels that way when she has slept too long.

She creeps out of the house, past her snoring father, and down to the street. She runs to the waterfront, swinging her arms like she is hammering nails. This time, Black Legionnaires are onto her and will sell her as a concubine overseas if she doesn’t escape. Emelia doesn’t know what a concubine is, except that it is a very bad thing for a young girl to become, and it happens often in the stories that are told by old sailors from the bows of their ships to the laborers.

Today, she will earn a penny running errands, she decides, and then she will draw the face better than she ever has. Sometimes, she wishes that her drawings could remain longer than the chalk; she dreams of buying canvas and paint and putting the sun down in all his magnificence. Maybe then she will get it right, and truly capture him in a way that she can share with her family. Blanco once saw her drawing the sun and only laughed shook his head. That was when she decided to move up onto the hill for her sketches. Negro seems to know about them, but he never speaks of them. Sometimes she wishes that he would. She almost wants someone to explain it to her as much as she wants to explain it to herself.

For most of the morning, Emelia delivers bread across town for the baker, whose son stepped on a shard of glass and would not be walking for the next several days. To and from the bakery, she is chased by goblins, wicked sea gulls, and sea spirits with sharp tridents that will jab her fiercely if she slows. Finally, there is no more bread to deliver, and the baker’s wife pays her three pennies for the morning’s work, promising that Emelia can make more if she comes back the next day. Everyone knows how fast Emelia can run, and often they vie for her to run their deliveries when their regular help is unavailable.

Emelia stops home and places two of the pennies in her father’s lap. He nods always when she brings him money, but never looks her in the eye. She backs away, watching him for some other reaction, and then she is off, down the streets, only just avoiding the roof-bandits and their lassos tossing from above.

She comes to the chalk seller and gives the old woman her penny. “Yellow, please.”

“Of course, dear.” The old woman’s hands fumble within her box until she withdraws a green stick. “Here you are.”

“Ma’am, I’m sorry. That stick is green,” Emelia says, suddenly feeling a cold chill run down her neck. It is green like the man’s hat.

The old woman frowns, but reaches back into her box and feels again. This time, her hands returns with Emelia’s yellow.

“Stay away from him, little one,” the old woman says, and does let go of the chalk. “He’s been around; I can smell him.” Then she drops the chalk into Emelia’s hand.

“Thank you!” Emelia says when she is already halfway around the bend and to the bakery. She runs as if the man in the green hat is there behind her, following without taking a step, just floating in the air alongside, and she runs faster than she ever has before. When she glances back, she sees him and he waves to her with a grin. She runs faster.

When she reaches a nice spot for drawing, she nearly collapses from the strain of running. She pants and wipes sweat from her brow. She ties her long brown hair back behind her head in a loose knot, only to look into her hand and see that she has broken her chalk stick in two while running. Emelia has never broken her chalk before.

Tears well up in her eyes, but before she can let them loose a hand grips her shoulder from behind and shakes, then spins her around. A fat man in brightly colored, expensive clothing glares at her and begins to shout. His voice blasts her like a hurricane.

“So you’re the useless thing that draws on my walls nearly every day! It costs me a penny to have your pointless doodlings scrubbed away! What’s this?” His sausage fingers pry open her hand and pluck the chalk from her. He throws the pieces to the ground and grinds them into dust.

“No more! It may not be against the law for you to draw here, but I won’t have it! If I catch you drawing your sun here again, I’ll have you sold to gypsies!”

Emelia is too frightened to say anything. The man is a rich banker, one her father owes money. She did not know that the walls she draws on nearly every day are the walls of his home.

“You look familiar,” he says. He squints and turns her face upwards. “You’re Marco’s daughter, aren’t you?”

Emelia is too terrified to admit that she is. What would he do if he knew? That look in his eyes, a greedy look she has seen in Blanco’s eyes so many times. He looks at her and sees something valuable.

“If I catch you here again, I will have you sold to gypsies, girl. Go away.”

Satisfied, the banker turns and enters his home, slamming the wooden door shut with a bang like a cannon shot. Emelia then begins to cry in great sobs that nearly shake her to pieces like the broken chalk she has just held in her hand.

If she doesn’t have her drawings, what does she have? Brothers who barely know she’s there and a father who has not spoken to her since her mother was taken away? Only the sun in her mind, and he is not always there. If he can leave her at sunset, he might leave her forever one day. She feels that he is the only one that cares for her anymore.

She wanders through the streets and alleyways, sniffing and sighing. The sun begins to set, the shadows grow longer, and the noises of the homes around her grow louder. She flops down on a coral stoop to rest her tired legs.

The man in the green hat is beside her, sitting with his feet crossed and his hands across his lap. The maze lines draw her eyes in again, hypnotizing them.

“There’s very little for you here, Emelia. If you could run to him,” he cocks his head to the west, “would you? Would you run as hard as you could?”

“I could only run that hard if something really chases me,” she says with a sniff.

“Wherever you run, little miss, something will pursue you, even if it’s ghosts of memory. But if you want to go to him, I’ll help. I have seen how he looks in your drawings. He is lonely, don’t you think?”

And that’s it exactly, the reason that she has felt sad for so long. The sun looks at her, each day, whether smiling or frowning, grinning or grimacing, and he is sad, because he is all alone in the sky. The moon and the stars must fear him.

“I would run to him, if only I could,” she whispers.

“Then look,” the man in the green hat says, and he opens his coat, dark as the approaching night. Inside, red eyes watch her. “The beasts will fall upon you and devour you if you do not run. Run to him. Only his light will save you.” And then they flow out; the gargoyles, the demons, the spirits, the ghouls and ghasts. The creatures of the night, the terrible things that cannot be seen directly, they come and they chase.

Emelia runs. She turns to the west and stretches her legs as much as they can, and then some more. Each step goes a little further. The creatures behind her howl with anger and hunger. She bounds over the walls of the city and across the treetops of the forest on the mountain slopes. The creatures bounce along beneath her, leaping up. Their claws graze the soles of her feet, but they cannot grasp her now. She is too fast.

She runs until she is a speck in the distance. She runs until she disappears over the horizon. The creatures give up, and shuffle back to the home in the man with the green hat’s coat.

When the sun rises in the morning, a tiny little star follows it closely, one that was not there the night before. And when the sun sets that night, the tiny little speck of light hurries to keep up with it.

Negro weeps when she does not come home. He goes into Emelia’s room to collect her things to give away to the needy children. In their drawings, Negro occasionally sees the sun drawn as an old man, and he holds hands with a fast-footed little girl who is always smiling.

Her father vanishes one night from his chair, and Blanco finds the floor around the chimney covered in soot and ash. The people of the city catch glimpses in the night of a pair running across the rooftops holding hands.

Consuela finds religion, but Blanco does not. She tricks him into marrying her after a late night of drunken revelry. They fight often over petty things, but especially Blanco’s cheating. Soon they have three horrid little children that Blanco spoils, mostly to irritate his wife.

The man in the green hat hikes into the forest, continuing on his journey to the east. Anyone he meets gets what she wants, but not always what she deserves.

© 2004 by Jeremiah Tolbert. Originally published in Polyphony: 4, edited by Deborah Layne and Jay Lake. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jeremiah Tolbert has published fiction in Lightspeed, Fantasy Magazine, Interzone, Asimov’s, Analog, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Shimmer, as well as in the anthologies The Way of the Wizard, Seeds of Change, Federations, Polyphony 4, and Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. He’s also been featured several times on the Escape Pod and PodCastle podcasts, and his story “The West Topeka Triangle” was nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award. In addition to being a writer, he is a web designer, photographer, and graphic artist. He lives in Kansas, with his wife and son.

EXCERPT: The Spaceship Next Door (John Joseph Adams Books)

Gene Doucette | 2030 words

Three years ago, a spaceship landed in an open field in the quiet mill town of Sorrow Falls, Massachusetts. It never opened its doors, and for all that time, the townspeople have wondered why the ship landed there, and what—or who—could be inside.

Then one day, a government operative—posing as a journalist—arrives in town, asking questions. He discovers sixteen-year-old Annie Collins, one of the ship’s closest neighbors, and a local fixture, known throughout the town, has some of the answers.

As a matter of fact, Annie Collins might be the most important person on the planet. She just doesn’t know it.

Forthcoming September 4, 2018 from John Joseph Adams Books (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).

1

THE FAULT IN OUR STARSHIP

The spaceship landed on a cool night in August, in a field that wasn’t being used for anything in particular.

Like most remarkable things, nobody realized it was remarkable as it happened. The ship lit up the sky above Sorrow Falls when entering the atmosphere, but that was only slightly unusual in the way a meteor could be slightly unusual.

Later, eyewitness accounts would describe the evening as becoming “as bright as daytime” in that moment, but this was a profound exaggeration. The truth was, while the object flashed brightly, an observer had to already be looking skyward to see it. If one were instead looking at the road, or the television, or the ceiling, the craft would have gone unnoticed as it traveled toward that field on the edge of town.

It was also nearing midnight, on a Tuesday.

Prior to the arrival of the spaceship, Sorrow Falls was a prototypical rural mill town, which is to say there was nothing unusual or spectacular about it. Most residents were either mill employees or farmers. Nearing midnight, on a Tuesday in August, just about everybody was sleeping.

It’s possible the sonic boom woke up one or two people, but as was the case with the supposed eyewitnesses startled by the profound brightness that didn’t happen, the boom was unlikely to have awoken anyone. The sound made by the object was more like a pop. To those who did hear it, the volume was approximately equivalent to that of a Jake-braking eighteen-wheeler two blocks away.

In other words, had the spaceship arrived at the surface of the earth as the meteor it resembled initially, the number of people who claimed to have seen its passage across the sky would have dwindled significantly.

It wasn’t a meteor, though, and it didn’t behave like one. Not entirely.

Meteors didn’t slow down and turn. Meteors didn’t have landing lights. And in all of history there had never been a recorded instance of a meteor hovering. These exceptions to the standard trajectory of a falling object were what convinced the handful of true witnesses that this was indeed a remarkable thing.

Someone called the police. (Two hundred and seventeen people in the town claim to have made the call; nobody knows who actually did.) At the time, the Sorrow Falls local police force consisted of twenty-two officers—two of whom were on maternity leave—and seven official squad cars. Three of those cars were dispatched to locate the object.

They couldn’t find it.

In fairness to those officers, they were told to locate a brightly glowing object that had landed from space, which wasn’t a particularly accurate description once the ship touched down and turned its lights off. Also, they had every reason to believe there was no such object and somebody had been drinking.

That left the job of first contact to a man named Billy Pederson. This was entirely due to a combination of luck and an unkind work schedule, as Billy happened to be the first person to drive down the road nearest to the unused field—or if not the first person, the first one to look to his right at the correct moment—and spot the object through an opening in the trees.

He would say later he knew what was there was not of this world, but that wasn’t the truth. The truth (as he would admit in private to anyone who asked provided they didn’t work for a media outlet) was that his first thought was where did this house come from and how did it go up overnight?

The spaceship didn’t look like a house, but Billy’s initial perception was understandable only because most rational people tend to go to “interstellar spacecraft” last, after exhausting other options.

It also wasn’t large enough to be a proper house. A pool house, perhaps, or a large shed.

It was a matte black vehicle resting on four squat legs, with a curved surface and with no apparent door. The sides were a warren of tubes and vents and dark round holes that looked either like a place for spotlights or—if you were in the midst of a nightmare and looking at this craft—eyeballs.

It was arguably saucer-like, and no doubt looked round from beneath or above, but from the side it looked like a tall, black, birthday cake, or an unusually thick and wide cap on a steam pipe.

The ship sat in a ring of blackened grass. Again, what Billy did next depended upon who was asking. To the many, many interviewers he sat with after the morning of first contact, he would say that he reached the edge of the landing ring (as it was soon called) and understood somehow that going any further would be dangerous, so he stopped and called the sheriff.

That wasn’t really true. He actually did step past the burnt grass ring, and got within about five or six feet of the ship before deciding he didn’t really feel like getting any closer.

When asked to elaborate on this, he couldn’t.

“I dunno, I just sort of lost interest,” he said. “Didn’t seem important anymore.”

He did call the sheriff, though. Thus, the first confirmed sighting of an alien spaceship on the planet was recorded in the police logs at 6:42 a.m., August 14, as a case of possible trespassing.

• • • •

The police came, and someone remembered the meteor hunt from the night before and connected it to the strange object in the field, and then more police came. Then the fire department, a couple of state police troopers, and an ambulance for some reason, and soon the tiny road—at the time it was called Tunney Way—was so overrun with vehicles nobody could get past.

Sometime around 10:00 a.m., the sheriff got his hands on a bullhorn and started asking if the occupants of the ship could please come out with your hands up. This sparked a minor debate as to the likelihood that anyone inside the spaceship (a) understood English, and (b) had hands. The debate and the question were both moot, though, as nobody inside the craft responded in any obvious way. It didn’t open, or make a noise, or flash a light, or otherwise react to the query.

Another debate ensued, regarding the legitimate alienness of the ship and the potential that this was only an elaborate hoax. The fire chief pointed out that the craft could easily be something constructed out of cardboard and foam, and surely if that were the case it would be light enough to be moved to the field in one evening, perhaps specifically on an evening when a meteor had also been spotted. The report could have even been a part of the hoax: perhaps there was no meteor either.

This theory gained enough traction that by 11:30, the sheriff decided to postpone the call he’d been planning to make to the National Guard and just walk up to the ship and see what was what.

He and two of his deputies did just that, retracing the same steps Billy had taken and getting just about as far, until all three of them decided this was actually a bad idea—suffering, some said, from a sudden and inexplicable lack of fortitude—and they should try something else.

They stepped back. And when it was pointed out that by not getting any closer they failed to resolve the question of whether or not the object was a large prank, the sheriff took out his gun, dropped to a knee, and fired two rounds at the center of the ship.

A spectacular thing—the first real spectacular thing—happened.

The bullets ceased to exist. They reached a certain point in the air beyond the skin of the ship’s hull, flashed brightly, and then were gone, much like a mosquito in a bug zapper. Their disappearance was accompanied by a deep THUD, like a thousand pianos hitting a low C at the same time. It wasn’t so much heard as felt, deep in the belly near the umbilical.

It was enough to convince the sheriff not to fire a third round.

He got to his feet and turned to the nearest deputy.

“Somebody get me the president,” he said.

Of all the embellishments surrounding the events of the morning of first contact, one thing remained true: he actually did say that.

• • • •

Calling the president of the United States was not something the sheriff’s department of a small Massachusetts mill town could just do, it turned out. There were steps to take, and jurisdictions to consider, and people to convince.

Convincing people was a big hurdle. It didn’t much matter how sane and level-headed any one person in this chain of reportage was, the person on the other end of each link was going to begin with, no really, why are you calling? and there wasn’t much anyone could do about that.

Compounding the problem was that as far as anybody was concerned, alien spaceships didn’t simply land at the edge of little towns in the Connecticut River valley, and if they did, they didn’t land only there. Admittedly, that opinion was colored by Hollywood movies and science fiction books, but actual military history and tactics further informed those stories. If the ship was the vanguard of an invasion, it was in the wrong place. If it was part of a fleet, there would have been other ships. If it was lost, it would have moved, or asked for directions. If it was disabled—it didn’t look disabled, but how would anybody know?—somebody would have asked for help or a wrench. Or something.

In other words, once past the whole spaceship thing, the hardest part about getting the right people to believe that this remarkable event had happened in Sorrow Falls was that the spaceship hadn’t done anything.

It just sat there. Sure, it could make bullets disappear, but someone had to shoot the gun. That wasn’t so much a thing it did, as it was a thing it did in response to someone else doing a thing. It was not in any real sense—after landing—a proactive spaceship.

Still, the president was eventually notified. It happened about two weeks after the ship landed and approximately six hours before the media was to go live with the story. By the time of the media announcement, the army had already cordoned off the field and taken over about a third of the town. (In fairness, this was not a lot of space in terms of pure acreage, and the land they claimed was fallow farmland, and the army was, on the whole, extremely polite about the entire thing.)

That evening, the president held a press conference confirming that the planet had been visited by aliens, and Sorrow Falls became the most-talked-about place in the world.

That was three years ago.

Copyright © 2018 by Gene Doucette. Excerpted from The Spaceship Next Door by Gene Doucette. Published by permission of the author and JJA Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Gene Doucette is the author of the best-selling The Spaceship Next Door, the sci-fi mystery Unfiction, sci-fi thriller Fixer, and The Frequency of Aliens, a sequel to The Spaceship Next Door. He also writes the Immortal novels, a fantasy series. He is also an award‑winning screenwriter and playwright. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

A Few of Our Favorite Things

Wendy N. Wagner | 1864 words

Building a 100th issue has given the magazine a chance to take stock of its mission and what it has done best. I didn’t join the regular crew of Lightspeed until just four years ago, but it was already a major inspiration to me. I can remember the excitement that filled me reading the first issue of Lightspeed—that beautiful, tender cover art, the gripping new voices, the seriously fun nonfiction (if you don’t remember Carol Pinchefsky’s “Top Ten Reasons Why Uplifted Animals Don’t Make Good Pets,” I recommend revisiting it), but most of all, the absolute sensawunda permeating every inch of the magazine. And wonder has truly been the magazine’s guiding inspiration over the past eight years. Even as Lightspeed has expanded to include fantasy, ebook-exclusive content, and three volumes of special issues devoted to inclusivity, the team has steered the ship toward inspiration, insight, and ever-newer territory.

To celebrate the work we’ve done, I’ve asked members of the Lightspeed community—contributors and staff—to name their favorite stories or experiences working with the magazine. It’s a veritable smorgasbord of wonder!

• • • •

I love so many Lightspeed stories, but Hao Jingfang’s “Invisible Planets” is an absolutely stunning travelogue, reminiscent of Le Guin’s “Changing Planes” in its use of vignettes to tell a larger story and its subtle, poetic heart. This was the first of Hao Jingfang’s stories I had the opportunity to read and it blew me away.

— Sarah Pinsker, four-time Lightspeed fiction contributor

“We Are the Cloud” by Sam J. Miller opened my eyes to what short SFF could be. While it’s impossible to choose my favorite Lightspeed story, “We Are the Cloud” was probably the most important to me as a reader and a writer. It’s a tender, heartbreaking tale about exploitation, loneliness, sex, and hope, and doesn’t apologize for anything. It also helped open my eyes to a lot within the field, with how it was received, that I had been ignorant of and complicit in. It’s such a wonderfully imagined, beautiful story that has stayed with me even years later.

— Charles Payseur, Lightspeed fiction contributor

Maria Dahvana Headley’s “The Traditional.” Beautifully and lyrically, Dahvana Headley transports surrealist images into a chaotic, unsettling future. My husband and I just passed our tenth anniversary, and thankfully did not have to resort to this story as a gift guide.

— Rachel Swirsky, seven-time Lightspeed fiction contributor, reprints editor of Women Destroy Science Fiction!

One of my favorite Lightspeed stories is Yoon Ha Lee’s “The Knight of Chains, the Deuce of Stars.” Years after reading it for the first time, I still recall its strange, vivid images—the tower, the warden’s gun, the map in Niristez’s eyes.

— Megan Arkenberg, four-time Lightspeed fiction contributor

“Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man’s Back,” by Joe R. Lansdale: It taps into so many sub-categories of horror: apocalyptic, familial, biological, psychological and more. Death seems like a mercy for the narrator by the end of it.

— Erin Stocks Rubin, former Lightspeed assistant editor

“The Faerie Tree” by Kathleen Kayembe really hit home for me and I’ve recommended it to a ton of people since I first read it. I’ve read a lot of fairytale reimaginings in the last few years, but this one packed a unique punch.

— Charlie Jane Anders, six-time Lightspeed fiction contributor

Lightspeed has published so many magnificent stories that it’s impossible to pick a favorite, but it’s easy to randomly choose one that I loved to bits and pieces, because there’s billions. One that haunts me to this day is Marie Vibbert’s “Michael Doesn’t Hate His Mother,” a terrifying story of monstrosity and motherhood, love and fear, and the twisted, tormented territory of childhood.

— Sam J. Miller, three-time Lightspeed fiction contributor

I’d like to highlight Theodora Goss’s “Cimmeria: From the Journal of Imaginary Anthropology,” a sly and beautiful story about a group of anthropology students who make up a country—and make it real. I love how this story plays with fantasy and reality, from the reference to Borges (a real writer who wrote about an imaginary place that takes over reality), to the made-up journal citation in real MLA style. It’s a story with great inventiveness, ambition, and panache. You can read it for a sense of wonder, and also for a critique of that very thing.

— Sofia Samatar, four-time Lightspeed fiction contributor

I remember clearly the first time I read Sylvia Spruck Wrigley’s “Alive, Alive Oh.” I was in a hotel room while in the midst of a week traveling on business, and the reflective nature of the story and its emotional resonance on parenthood and what home means really affected me. I’ve read countless great stories in Lightspeed, but Wrigley’s has a special place in my heart.

— Jake Kerr, three-time Lightspeed fiction contributor

Though they are very different, Lightspeed has published two short stories that are not just among my favorites from the magazine, but my favorites ever. They are “The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species” by Ken Liu and “Give Her Honey When You Hear Her Scream” by Maria Dahvana Headley. Ken’s story uses structure with grace and precision, and reading Maria’s makes me feel as if I am drowning in a dream of language. I go back to each again and again.

— Kat Howard, ten-time Lightspeed fiction contributor

I couldn’t pick just one story, but I managed to narrow it down to my top three: I loved Kat Howard’s “A Flock of Grief” because, like all of Howard’s work, the way she turns emotion into imagery has haunted me ever since I first read it. Maria Dahvana Headley’s “Bit-U-Men” delighted me right from the beginning because stories that take real-life weird facts (in this case, that people used to literally eat mummies at parties) and give them the fantasy treatment they deserve are always right up my alley. And on the science fiction side, Terence Taylor’s “Wilson’s Singularity” turned up at just the same time I happened to read an article about how current AIs trained on natural language corpora inevitably inherit bias from that language, making the main character’s central choice in this story all the more relevant and realistic; a true intersection of science and science fiction in the current day.

— Dana Watson, Lightspeed copy editor

“The Venus Effect” by Violet Allen: An incredible story whose power derives from its science fiction—at once embodying and transcending genre, demonstrating SF’s ability to tell stories that wouldn’t be possible in any other mode.

— Charles Yu, two-time Lightspeed fiction contributor

Honestly, my favorite Lightspeed experience feels egotistical, but it also feels like magic: editing Queers Destroy Science Fiction!. I got to meet so many amazing authors, and was even the one to buy the first story by several incredible authors. I came away with so much more respect for editors in general, and our community as a whole.

— Seanan McGuire, nine-time Lightspeed fiction contributor, guest editor of Queers Destroy Science Fiction!

One of my all-time favorite stories to appear on Lightspeed has to be “The Infinite Love Engine” by Violet Allen. This story is bursting with coolness and hipness, and has a very unique voice that sucked me in from the first paragraph. It’s not often you encounter a story that’s so effortlessly original without being alienating. It’s a warm, cozy blanket made from a material you’ve never seen before. I’m still smiling, recalling Allen’s amazing work in this story.

— Jeremiah Tolbert, ten-time Lightspeed fiction contributor, Lightspeed web designer

Having the chance to work on Lightspeed’s Women Destroy Science Fiction! edition was a real treat. Not just doing the cover art, but also doing the art direction, finding other artist contributors, matching up stories with artists that I knew would do an amazing job of illustrating that story. Brilliant authors, Brilliant artists, all of them women. That was really something else.

— Galen Dara, fifty-three time Lightspeed illustrator, art director for Women Destroy Science Fiction!

It’s been my pleasure to work with Lightspeed. I love the selection of stories you assign me. They are all super inspiring and evocative. Speaking about the memorable pieces, Ashok K. Banker’s “Tongue” was definitely the most unforgettable, because it made me very emotional. For my little pleasure, I painted a noose into her hair, a subtle expression of my liberal perspective on female rights. Indrapramit Das’s “The Worldless” was also a delight to work on. The story spoke to me since I’m the first generation immigrant. I felt I could relate to the characters. Caroline M. Yoachim’s “Welcome to the Medical Clinic at the Interplanetary Relay Station” is another favorite. I loved the format and the ending so much. It was also very fun to paint the cold grey atmosphere. Lastly, A. Merc Rustad’s series has been extremely inspirational. I love the world setting! I’ve been having a lot of fun imagining and visualizing the characters.

— Reiko Murakami, thirteen-time Lightspeed illustrator

My favorite Lightspeed story is “Zen and the Art of Starship Maintenance” by Tobias Buckell: I’ve known Toby since we were Clarion students together back in 1999, and it’s been a thrill to watch him grow as a writer and artist. To my mind, this story cements his place as one of the all-time greats. It’s everything a science fiction story should be, full of vivid imagination, memorable characters, and moral complexity.

— David Barr Kirtley, six-time Lightspeed fiction contributor

When I came across A. Merc Rustad’s “Tomorrow When We See the Sun” as a submission, I was so delighted! Great imagery, epic space opera setting, wonderful characters, so moving and dramatic, and all with a hopeful ending. I gave it the highest possible recommendation. John probably didn’t realize that meant I’d have to quit if he didn’t buy it, but fortunately he did (along with many of Merc’s others, later) and here we are.

— Laurel Amberdine, Lightspeed assistant editor

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Wendy N. Wagner is the author of more than forty short stories and has also written two novels for the Pathfinder role-playing game. Her third novel, An Oath of Dogs, is a sci-fi thriller from Angry Robot Books. She serves as the managing/associate editor of Lightspeed and Nightmare magazines. She is also the non-fiction editor of Women Destroy Science Fiction!, which was named one of NPR’s Best Books of 2014, and the guest editor of Queers Destroy Horror! She lives in Oregon with her very understanding family.

Book Reviews: September 2018

Arley Sorg | 1549 words

This month, reviewer Arley Sorg turns his attention to new novels by S.L. Huang (Zero Sum Game), P. Djèlí Clark (The Black God’s Drums), and Rebecca Roanhorse (Trail of Lightning).

Zero Sum Game
S.L. Huang
Hardcover / Ebook
ISBN: 9781250180254
Tor, October 2018, 336 pgs

Cas Russell uses math as a power. Some narratives may feature characters utilizing math to save the day (six seasons of Numb3rs comes to mind, more recently The Librarians), and there are stories where genius “superheroes” use science, including heavy use of math, to fight villains (such as Marvel’s Amadeus Cho). Cas uses math to solve problems as well as to take physical actions: Calculations make dodges possible, enable knock-out punches, or result in a graceful dismount off a crashing motorcycle. This makes Zero Sum Game a bit more unique, as the mathematician is brought out of the office and put into the field. In fact, she’s armed with weapons and eager to fight.

Cas is enjoyable as a strong, edgy, reluctant hero. She’d rather kick down a door than pick a lock, and pointing a gun at her is a bad idea. She’s a loner who does freelance “retrieval,” whether objects or people. When she’s hired to retrieve Courtney Polk from the clutches of a Columbian drug cartel, events take unexpected turns and Cas is pulled into a much larger conspiracy. Moreover, she soon discovers someone is manipulating the minds of the people involved, including her own. Cas is forced to work with people she doesn’t trust while unsure if she can trust herself. Meanwhile, someone is trying very hard to kill her.

The one person Cas does trust is Rio, an enigmatic killer with his own code. Counterpoint to Rio is Tresting, a former cop carrying a grudge who has his own agenda, and who comes complete with a flamboyant partner. And then there’s Dawna Polk, the woman who hired Cas, and who might also be trying to kill her. In straightforward, smooth lines, interesting characters are composed, engaging conflicts flare up, and the body count rises.

Math as a power is a cool idea. Having a hero who can use it in combat is fun. Specific applications are kept simple and somewhat vague—a line about vectors and variables rushing through Cas’s head as she’s jumping through a window, for example. This makes the read uncomplicated and quick, if at times flirting with the unbelievable. At the same time, the narrative gives a deft treatment of a hero and her cohorts fighting against mental manipulation.

Zero Sum Game is an action-focused adventure which takes off immediately and rarely slows down. Scenes are cinematic and sometimes brutal. Solid dialogue propels the story forward, and occasional humor provides welcome relief to tension. Altogether, it’s a well-plotted, entertaining read.

The Black God’s Drums
P. Djèlí Clark
Paperback / Ebook
ISBN: 9781250294715
Tor.com Publishing, August 2018, 112 pages

Reading The Black God’s Drums is nothing less than falling into another world. Exquisite worldbuilding offers an alternate 1884 New Orleans, one with airships in the sky and deities riding just beneath the skin. The city is a neutral ground between the confederates and “one of the few nonaligned territories in the now broken United States.” It is also surrounded by “Les Grands Murs,” giant walls built to protect against massive tempests. As a result, the same massive tempests that the walls should shield against could potentially drown the city.

Creeper roams the streets of New Orleans, a thirteen-year-old orphan with a knack for climbing and the goddess Oya riding her mind, waiting to take over. Hiding one evening in an alcove near the airship mooring masts and searching the crowds for her next mark, Creeper stumbles upon a plot to steal a magical weapon: The Black God’s Drums. Thinking this information is worth more than stolen trinkets, she tries to sell what she knows at bordello Shá Rouj, which “lets in men of any colour and offers women just the same—big Dutch gals, scarlet-haired Irish, dark senoritas, midnight-black Senegalese.” Instead of scoring a big payday, she is pulled into a quest to save the city, along with an airship captain and a wild youth raised by seer nuns.

Creeper’s New Orleans is a linguistic wonderland. The story is told in a variety of accents and dialects, lending flavor to a tale bursting with cultural plenitude, while managing to still be readable. Histories are shared, stories revealed, and as a reader, I feel as if I’ve learned while being entertained. Exploring this world with Creeper is enough to make the novella interesting.

Aiding in the telling of these stories is a striking set of memorable, unique characters. Strong women and cunning girls take leading roles, and are called to heroics as the stakes rise.

The plot ambles a bit, leaning on happenstance or luck—or perhaps it is the manipulation of goddesses. And to my thinking, while the main character is a thirteen-year-old, Creeper’s age has little impact on the story or its events, aside from occasional surprise or distrust. She never seems like someone of that age (except perhaps in one scene), and may as well be twenty or thirty.

All the same, The Black God’s Drums is thoroughly enjoyable, penned in a strong voice, with style and vision that adds much to genre.

Trail of Lightning
Rebecca Roanhorse
Paperback / Ebook
ISBN: 9781534413504
Saga Press, June 2018, 304 pages

In the aftermath of a climate disaster in which large swaths of the world have drowned in a massive flood, dramatically reshaping the geopolitical landscape, Navajo gods have resurfaced. And so have Navajo monsters. Maggie Hoskie is Diné (Navajo), a flood survivor, and a monster hunter. Her tribal powers make her a gifted killer. But her past may have left her cursed, and she may be a danger to anyone who gets too close.

Trail of Lightning’s opening is tense, vivid, and effective. A desperate family enlists Maggie to rescue their kidnapped daughter. Within a few pages, we understand Maggie as an outsider, we understand her angers and complications, and we are rooting hard for her. Maggie Hoskie immediately enraptures, offering a great action hero full of promise and problems.

Maggie’s narrative co-stars are nearly as captivating as she is. Kai Arviso is the young medicine man she has to work with, despite her hesitations. He’s a flashy kid, sharply dressed, hidden behind reflective sunglasses. Then there are the gods and immortals, powerful beings with their own unknown agendas who could be worse than the monsters.

The stakes are serious. The writing is crisp. As if this weren’t enough to sell a book, there’s more.

Science fiction is rife with post-apocalyptic tales. Far fewer are the books that draw on Navajo traditions—or other indigenous cultures. Stepping into this story is entering a tradition that is often either grossly misunderstood and misrepresented or completely unacknowledged and ignored. Trail of Lightning is a well-researched, easy cultural introduction, ripe with distinct notes, subtleties, and icons. Avid genre readers will find delightful, glittering surprises, as many familiar ideas are presented in slightly different ways or with interesting twists. Word of warning: It’s still fiction.

Throughout the tale runs a powerful and multi-layered commentary on gender. Maggie is a warrior and a woman. What that means shifts from perspective to perspective, just as the way she feels about her own womanhood shifts from moment to moment, scene to scene. Where and when she fulfills expectations or resists them is complex and thought-provoking.

If you just want a kick-ass story about a warrior fighting monsters, a tale chock full of cool ideas, this is a great pick. Trail of Lightning is action-packed, well-written, and fun. It gets brutal and dark, it has moments of humor, and has plenty of great scenes. The narrative does seem to rely on random encounters or chance, especially earlier on, but the turns of plot, the details and the characterizations all make up for it. Then again, if you seek a socially conscious book, one which makes you think, and one which is likely to teach you things you didn’t know without being preachy or beating you over the head, Trail of Lightning is also for you.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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.

Media Reviews: September 2018

Jenn Reese | 1505 words

Nowadays it seems like great new SF TV shows and movies arrive every month. But those aren’t the only media experiencing a surge of new properties fueled by excellent speculative writing. Authors and artists are crossing over to game writing and design, video games are crossing over to books and comics, cats and dogs are living together—it’s glorious! So let’s talk about some recent video games that offer not just old-school entertainment, but an immersive, innovative way to explore speculative stories and ideas.

Forgotton Anne
forgottonanne.com
From ThroughLine Games / Square Enix
Available for PC, PS4, Xbox One

“Oh, look how sweet this game looks,” I said. “It reminds me of Kiki’s Delivery Service and other Studio Ghibli movies, with its adorable female protagonist named Anne and its array of anthropomorphized objects as characters. She’s going to talk to a shoe! And a lamp! This will be cute.”

Dear readers, this game is not “cute.” Rather, it’s not merely cute. It’s also a biting exploration of the way totalitarian regimes dehumanize their citizens. What better way to depict this objectification of people than to depict them as literal objects?

The first clue comes early, when we learn our protagonist, the very sweet Anne (Rachael Messer), also bears the title “Enforcer.” Bonku, Anne’s “Master,” is the only other human in the Forgotten Lands—a place where objects go when they fall through the metaphorical cracks of our world, the “Ether.” Bonku is trying to construct a bridge that will allow all the Forgotlings to return home. For many Forgotlings, like the shoe, this means they will once again have purpose. For many others, it means sacrificing the sentience and free will they have gained.

Anne was raised by her Master and has obeyed him without question until now. But as the Forgotlings’ unrest grows, a group of rebels begins destroying the infrastructure the Master needs for his Ether Bridge. Anne, who possesses the ability to permanently kill Forgotlings (called “distilling,” because they’re not human, right?), is torn between wanting to serve her Master and what she thinks is the greater good, and wanting to understand why some Forgotlings are rebelling. As the situation becomes more dire, Anne is forced to make difficult moral decisions that determine the fate of all Forgotlings, including her Master and herself.

The gameplay is simple and entertaining, with few mechanics to remember. Anne can interact with objects, jump, and occasionally use mechanical wings to jump greater distances. The Arca device gives Anne the ability to transfer energy out of and into objects, such as batteries and Forgotlings, and is the mechanism used for most of the game’s puzzle-solving. Overall, the gameplay is extremely forgiving. Unless you’re going for all the trophies, you can take your time on puzzles, fail repeatedly, and easily try again. There’s nothing new here, but the gameplay is solid and satisfying and rarely gets too frustrating.

Where Forgotton Anne truly excels is in its storytelling. The combination of layered themes, strong voice acting, and difficult player decisions creates a surprisingly immersive experience. The rebel “Mr. Fig” (Daniel Pierce) is extremely charming as a talking, wig-wearing “posing doll,” and you may find yourself—as I did—deeply concerned about his well being. (Okay, yes. I have a crush on Mr. Fig. In my defense, most of you will, too!)

Although some of the larger mysteries of this world remain unexamined even at the end of the game, Anne’s story is compelling and absolutely worth your time. Trust me, you won’t soon forget Forgotton Anne.

Play this . . .

If you like narrative games, traditional 2D animation, moral dilemmas, forgiving mechanics, casual platformers, and/or games where player actions can change the outcome of the story.

Don’t play this . . .

If you’re looking for hack-and-slash fights, highly challenging puzzles, or a difficult, dexterity-reliant platformer experience.

Gorogoa
gorogoa.com
From Buried Signal / Annapurna Interactive
Available for PC, PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, Android, Apple

If you ever wanted to step into a Shaun Tan book (bit.ly/1jyGO2q)—to experience that blend of surreal beauty and understated storytelling—look no further than Gorogoa, a gorgeous puzzle game created and illustrated by Jason Roberts.

“Gorogoa” is the name of an invented creature (bearing no connection to existing mythologies from our world) that appears in the fictional city of the game. The player’s task is to help a boy construct an offering to the creature by finding five “fruits” of different colors.

The mechanics are simple: On a grid of four squares, the player can slide images to different quadrants, zoom in and out, move up and down or to the sides within the tiles, and occasionally break a tile into several new images. As the tiles are layered and shifted, we also shift through time and scale, exploring different moments of the boy’s life overlaid with his (fictional) religious studies.

Occasionally combinations spark animations that engender a growing sense of melancholic wonder. An old man climbing stairs on the side of the mountain snaps into place with the wheel of a cart and the gear-like design of a plate, and suddenly a doorway rotates ninety degrees and allows the boy to enter a new scene. Removing the cover on a box of crayons allows you to replace the crayons with coal, making the box heavier and upsetting the balance of the shelf upon which it was resting. It’s incredibly satisfying to discover these little moments, like unearthing tiny, sparkling treasures.

It doesn’t take long to play through the whole game, and the story wraps up without much fanfare. Even so, it’s a gorgeous, meditative experience with an emotional wallop far greater than its runtime implies.

Play this . . .

If you enjoy games that feel like poetry, find puzzles relaxing, care more about the journey than the destination, only want to spend a couple of hours total, and/or don’t mind the lack of a coherent, linear narrative.

Don’t play this . . .

If you’re looking for fully realized characters or a complete story, you don’t like experimenting with mechanics, or you require many hours of play to feel as if you “got your money’s worth.”

Minit
minitgame.com
A collaboration between Kitty Calis, Jan Willem Nijman, Jukio Kallio, and Dominik Johann / DevolverDigital
Available for PC, PS4, and Xbox One

Here’s the deal with Minit: The first thing you do is find a cursed sword, and after that, you die every sixty seconds. For the rest of the game.

How does this work? Some of the objects you find persist between deaths, you can occasionally nab a new “home base,” and some puzzles remain solved. Other than that . . .

SO. MANY. DEATHS.

I thought I’d find this stressful, but much to my surprise, the opposite occurred. There’s very little pressure to accomplish anything when you know you’re going to die. Get frustrated? Wait a few seconds and you’ll die and start back at your home base. Plus, if you do want to get something done, it can only be the tiniest next step along the path. (There’s a life lesson there, but I refuse to see it.)

Although it’s possible to find the factory that creates cursed swords and shut it down (woohoo!), do yourself a favor and find a walkthrough when you’re done—there are many hidden moments of whimsy in this game, and you don’t want to miss any of them.

Play this . . .

If you enjoy old-school Rogue-like adventure games, retro graphics, dexterity-based challenges, and/or you just want to try something new and fun for a few minutes.

Don’t play this . . .

If you’re looking for profound characters or narrative, graphics in colors other than simple black-and-white, or something relaxing. (Remember, it’s called Minit for a reason.)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jenn Reese writes science fiction and fantasy for readers of all ages. She’s published numerous short stories in places such as The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, and the World Fantasy Award-winning anthology Paper Cities. Above World is the Norton Award-nominated first novel in her middle-grade trilogy from Candlewick Press and combines science fiction, mythology, and martial arts. Jenn works as a freelance graphic designer and spends her free time playing video games, watching way too much TV, and planning all the activities she’d enjoy if she ever left her cozy house in Portland. Jenn can be found online at jennreese.com.

Interview: John Joseph Adams

Christian A. Coleman | 5997 words

John Joseph Adams might be Lightspeed’s editor and publisher, but for many of our readers—and heck, even the staff—he’s a bit of an enigma. How can he run two magazines, his own novel imprint, oversee the Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy series, and create more amazing short fiction anthologies? Does he ever sleep? Does his love of death metal and goats give him time-bending editorial superpowers? Is he an editorially-optimized artificial construct from the future, sent back in time to help us discover the best science fiction and fantasy? Mystified, we asked our staff interviewer to find out a bit more about JJA.

Happy 100th issue of Lightspeed, John! What’s it feel like to reach such a big milestone?

It’s kind of surreal! I’m really proud of what the team and I have been able to accomplish with the magazine over the years, and looking back on the catalog of stories we’ve published, I sometimes kind of shake my head with wonderment—especially over some of the stories we published right in our first couple of issues, when the magazine was just brand new. It’s a real honor to have kept the support and trust of our readers and subscribers—and writers!—over the course of so many issues, and I certainly hope we can keep the magazine going indefinitely; my enthusiasm for what we’re doing has never waned—if anything, it’s grown over time. Here’s to the next hundred issues!

Hear! Hear! Has your vision for the magazine changed in any significant way since launching it?

I’m not sure that it has changed, actually! I mean, there’s the issue of us merging Fantasy into Lightspeed in January 2012, after I became publisher of both magazines (I was always editor of Lightspeed, but after about a year and a half I acquired it—and Fantasy—from Prime Books); so in a way, the vision of the magazine changed at that time, since Lightspeed was originally just science fiction. But other than that—and various tinkerings we’ve done along the way, like adding the novella reprints to our ebook editions—I feel like Lightspeed is very much still the magazine it started out as, at least in terms of its overall vision.

I feel like my vision has always been to publish the broadest range of kinds of science fiction (and then also fantasy) in the magazine, and that certainly hasn’t changed at all. Of course, I like to think that I’ve continued to evolve as an editor along the way, and that I’m a better editor now than I was when I started. If the “vision” of a magazine includes elements like diversity and such, I can say that we’ve made a more concerted effort over the years in that direction to be more inclusive and welcoming of voices across all spectrums of life, though of course, we did start out with that in mind, and our diversity statement has been part of our writers’ guidelines from day one. Which is not to say that we couldn’t have done better—obviously we could have, and we will continue to strive to.

I think the Destroy special issues were some stellar examples of how inclusive and welcoming Lightspeed is. They were some of my favorites, too! Any plans to do sequels for those like you’ve done for some of your anthologies?

I had really hoped that sequels wouldn’t be necessary—that the societal concerns that prompted the special issues wouldn’t still be so prevalent that sequels would be warranted. Alas, it does seem like all three do indeed warrant it, as such thinking does still seem exceedingly prevalent both with readers and with people as a whole, and, in fact, perhaps has gotten even worse thanks to certain political upheavals as of late. Obviously, we never thought that our special issues would magically fix everything, but several years hence, you’d think society would have made more progress by now. (But maybe that was just wishful thinking.) As I’m writing this, even the Worldcon programming committee just made a series of big blunders that was essentially the result of the exact kind of thinking the Destroy issues were rebelling against. (They did apologize, and as of this writing, they seem to have corrected course, thanks to the assistance of the stalwart Mary Robinette Kowal swooping in to save the day.) But still, the fact that even the convention our field kind of orbits around could make such a mistake does make it seem like the work of the Destroy issues is far from done.

So we don’t have any current plans, but I haven’t ruled it out as something that would never happen. One thing that’s challenging about them is that they’re a tremendous amount of work, and even though with those issues I’m just publisher, not also editor, they’re actually significantly more work for me than a regular issue—just on the editorial/publishing side (weirdly enough), to say nothing of all of the time and effort it takes to run a Kickstarter and then handle all the fulfillment. And with me being busier than ever now, it’s very difficult to contemplate. But this special issue might give me some insight into how feasible it might be to do a special issue without the accompanying Kickstarter, because honestly, running a Kickstarter is one of the most draining things I’ve ever done in publishing. But we’ll see! We also handed the reins over to Uncanny to do a Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction! Issue, so meanwhile there’s that Destroy issue to look forward to, which I have great confidence will be as high quality as the ones we published. (Which I’m told will be coming out around the same time as this issue!)

Looking back to 2010 when Lightspeed was first launched, what meaning does the very first issue have for you now?

That first issue was really something! With just four stories in that first issue, we ended up with (1) a Hugo finalist (Carrie Vaughn’s “Amaryllis”); (2) a Nebula finalist (Vylar Kaftan’s “I’m Alive, I Love You, I’ll See You in Reno”); and (3) a WSFA Small Press Award finalist (“The Cassandra Project” by Jack McDevitt)—and Carrie’s and Jack’s stories both were reprinted in best-of-the-year anthologies. But aside from those accolades, it was, of course, very gratifying to see how much readers responded to the magazine right out of the gates.

Here’s a few interesting things from that first issue, too, that have made it have additional significance for me:

Vylar’s story—which was the first story I ever bought for Lightspeed (and was in some ways the story the magazine was founded on)—was so emotionally resonant to me and my then-girlfriend Christie Yant that when we got married, we actually hired Vylar to script our ceremony for us; so instead of a special song, she and I have that special story.

Carrie’s story would be just one of many stories I would end up buying from Carrie over the years—when I tallied up fiction sales to Lightspeed, I found that she was the second-most prolific contributor after only Adam-Troy Castro—but also: While “Amaryllis” was in the first issue of Lightspeed, and our first Hugo Award nominee, Carrie’s novel Bannerless was also the first original novel I acquired for my John Joseph Adams Books imprint at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and it’s even set in the same world as her story! And then it also became the first novel I edited to be nominated for—and then win!—an award (the Philip K. Dick Award).

The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast actually launched around the same time as Lightspeed (pre-dating the magazine by just a couple of months), but I co-founded it with David Barr Kirtley (who also has a story in issue #1), and we went on to co-host a hundred episodes of it together, after which I stepped down as regular co-host and shifted into a producer role, with more occasional show appearances, and having produced more than 300 episodes and counting.

So looking back on that issue, it really was kind of chock-full of significant stories and relationships I’d have over that span of time.

Wow! It’s so awesome that Carrie Vaughn’s Bannerless won the Philip K. Dick Award! You guys must be thrilled!

Indeed we are! I’ve had good luck with Carrie and firsts and this milieu and awards. Bannerless was the first original novel I acquired for John Joseph Adams Books, and of course as mentioned above, “Amaryllis” was in the first issue of Lightspeed (and was the first story published featuring this milieu), and that was nominated for a Hugo Award. So I feel like if she and I are somehow able to accomplish some other “first” together, we’ll be in a good position for an award nomination or something!

But seriously, I’m super thrilled for Carrie, and I hope the PKD Award win will help the book reach a wider audience so we can keep the series going for a long, long time—I love spending time in that world, so I’d like to keep editing it. Oh and hey, the sequel to Bannerless, The Wild Dead, just came out in July, and a lot of the reviews are saying it’s even better than Bannerless. Just sayin’!

As someone who’s a veteran short story editor and anthologist, what are some major differences in editing novels? And what exactly do you look for in a novel for your John Joseph Adams Books imprint?

The biggest difference I’ve found between editing novels and short stories—besides the obvious issue of extreme length differential—is that novel structure can be extremely complicated and tricky to figure out. That can be true of short stories as well, of course, though since short fiction is more of a buyer’s market, while novels are a seller’s market, if a short story had complicated and broken structural issues, I probably just wouldn’t buy it. (Though I can think of at least one case where I did buy it and helped the writer restructure it; since the author wrote about it publicly in detail at the Inkpunks blog [bit.ly/2vhflSD] it’s fine to say that the story I’m referring to is “Requiem in the Key of Prose” by Jake Kerr [bit.ly/2OvQBP5].) But with novels, while you might reject one on submission because of complex structural issues, sometimes novels are bought on proposal (with sample chapters), so you might have no choice to work on major structural issues; or sometimes you buy one book, with an unnamed (and completely unwritten) second book when you do a two-book deal, so it’s much more of an unknown.

Otherwise, due to the length issue, I find it much harder to keep everything in my head all at once, since it’ll take me at least several days or more likely a couple of weeks to do a complete edit on a novel—whereas any short story I will edit over the course of a couple of hours, all in one day—so I tend to take a lot more notes in a separate document that I might need to stop and consider more after I get to the end of the manuscript. And because of all these kinds of complicated things, novel edits sometimes just kind of feel like they warrant a call with the author to discuss, rather than trying to go back and forth via email endlessly, whereas with a short story, I think I’ve literally never done that.

And when it comes to the anthologies you work on, how do you decide on the theme? You’ve put together collections about dystopias, zombies, the apocalypse, robot uprisings, mad scientists, vampires, Sherlock Holmes . . . the list goes on! Do you watch for trends in readership? Are you guided by instinct or your own interests?

There’s some of both! I definitely try to detect trends, but it’s hard to explain it exactly. I’m not sure it’s trends in readership I detect per se, but rather trends in fiction in general. For instance, my first anthology was Wastelands. It came out in 2008, but I started seeing this resurgence of interest in post-apocalyptic fiction in the slush pile at The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (where I worked as an assistant at the time) almost immediately after 9/11—so all the way back to the latter end of 2001. It took publishing a while to catch on, since my anthology didn’t come out for seven years after that (and I’d tried to sell a post-apocalyptic anthology—an all-original one—years earlier and had not been able to get anywhere with it).

But overall, it’s more like trying to hunt the zeitgeist. You pay attention to all of the things happening in the culture and try to see the things that seem to be coalescing to gain the most mindshare. Social media’s good for that kind of thing, because you can see what kinds of things people get really enthusiastic about.

My own interests are certainly a factor, too, naturally. If something to do with, say, baking, suddenly became the hot thing in society, and it made total sense to do a fantasy cakes anthology, well, that would be cool, but I wouldn’t be the guy to put that one together. I mean, I like cake, but I’m not passionate about it or how they’re made. Which is not to say you shouldn’t send me a story about magic cakes and the baker wizards that bake them—by all means, do! (Hmm, am I going to regret saying that?) But it’s just not a project I would pursue, because it doesn’t align with my interests sufficiently enough. So when I do hit on things that I am passionate about—and I have some zeitgeisty sense that it had a good chance of resonating enough to be commercial enough to attract interest from publishers—those are the anthology projects I end up pursuing.

One of your interests and favorite sub-genres is post-apocalyptic fiction. Tell us about why that is.

As everyone reading this likely knows, I also edit Nightmare Magazine, which publishes horror and dark fantasy. But my dirty little secret is that horror never really scares me. I don’t find demons or monsters scary. They’re impossible; I don’t have to worry about them doing anything to me. But the apocalypse seems eminently possible—and perhaps now more than it has in a long time, unfortunately—and I find that scary. But also kind of fascinating—because wouldn’t it be interesting to find yourself in a world where the slate of civilization has been wiped clean and yet we still have the benefit of the remnants of what came before and all we’ve learned till now to start over? Sure, there’s going to be lots of tough times scrounging for cans of pork and beans and fighting off marauders or whatever, but I’m fascinated by imagining what such a world would look like.

But, as I’ve talked about in some of my apocalypse anthology introductions, one of the appeals of apocalypse fiction is that it’s science fiction, but basically the most accessible science fiction (most of the time) to non-genre readers because of how easy it is to imagine the end of the world; whereas a reader transporting themself to a vast interstellar civilization takes more willing suspension of disbelief, imagining an apocalypse is pretty easy given one could happen with literally the press of a button somewhere. Plus, apocalypse fiction is often very adventure oriented, and kind of combines elements from several different genres, so, for me, it ends up firing a lot of my interest nodes, and because of that, potentially pulls in a lot of different kinds of readers. For instance, it shares a lot in common with westerns, because it’s kind of a “new frontier” type of fiction in many ways (speaking generally of course—not all apocalypse fiction is, but much of it is).

Anyway, all of that comes together to make it a favorite of mine. But if you really want to drill down deep, it’s entirely the fault of the ’80s video game Wasteland (which I, um, sort of stole my title from), which I was completely obsessed with as an early teen, and then, later, the early Fallout games. (Both created by Brian Fargo, so if you really want to boil it down, it’s all Brian Fargo’s fault.)

When you’re working on the Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy collections, how do you choose your guest editors? So far, they’ve been Joe Hill, Karen Joy Fowler, Charles Yu, and this year it’s N.K. Jemisin.

A lot of factors go into it, but first and foremost, of course, is the Best American team and I have to feel like the guest editor will make interesting selections—so basically being a lover of short stories is a must. Though the guest editor always needs to be a very notable writer, so I suppose that’s actually the first consideration: So you sort of look at who the most notable writers are at the moment—people who are at the top of their game (creatively, commercially, and culturally) right now—and come up with a list and see who seems like a good fit.

But as you can see from our list so far, we’re also trying to feature different kinds of writers as well. Nora Jemisin this year is our first sort of “core genre” guest editor, though of course the other three all obviously write genre fiction (and Joe and Karen both had their starts in genre magazines—and though Charlie was more genre-adjacent in terms of how his work is mostly published, he had a story way back in Lightspeed #6); part of that is to have a different kind of feel to each volume, or at least to see what kind of alchemy happens when you mix in those different editorial reagents, but also so that we can continue to maybe help the series find new audiences each time, draw different readers to try picking it up for the first time.

We haven’t selected the guest editor for the 2019 volume yet (covering the best of 2018); that tends to happen fairly late in the process, since the guest editor does not read alongside me all year—they just read the top eighty stories I select and then choose the twenty “best” stories from that array. (And since they’re supposed to read the stories anonymously, it’s actually better if they don’t try to keep up with the stuff published in the eligibility year.) It is getting around that time for us to nail that person down, though, so I should probably get on that!

What’s it been like to collaborate with them?

It’s been really interesting, and all of them have been fantastic to work with so far. Everyone’s been super diligent and enthusiastic about the process, and I have really loved seeing the introductions they end up writing after the process concludes. The most interesting part for me, of course, is seeing which stories they end up choosing—for everyone reading the book, too, naturally, but for me especially since I’ve read all of the stories in the top eighty.

Of the four guest editors so far, I feel like I had the best sense of which stories Charlie would like, and indeed did correctly guess several of his selections. The others were more of a black box to me—I really didn’t have much sense which stories they’d go for. Joe, for instance, I wouldn’t have guessed initially (though, in retrospect, I should have, because he does talk a lot about mainstream literary magazines on social media) how much he’d go for New Yorker genre stories, but then maybe the biggest surprise for me was that Karen selected a hard SF story from Analog, which I was kind of delighted by.

Do you feel that your short fiction projects and Lightspeed have to compete for eyes and mindspace now that we have a near glut of high-quality genre TV being produced these days? There’s so much to choose from—Stranger Things, Game of Thrones, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Expanse to name a few.

To some degree, sure. In years past, short fiction and novels was where a fan would need to go to get the vast majority of their SF/Fantasy fix, because there’d only be a handful of movies that came out every year, and you’d only get one that is anywhere near as smart and complex as an SF story or novel maybe once every couple years. And on TV, there’d only be a handful of genre shows, and a lot of them would get cancelled after a year or two. But now, you can totally get all of your SF/F fix by just watching TV, and a lot of it is extremely complex and smart, including the ones you named, of which three out of four of are based on books—and are very faithful adaptations.

That said, you’re never going to get me to see this proliferation of fantastic TV as a negative, even if maybe it’s possibly siphoning away some small percentage of our audience. I love television, and have taken it extremely seriously as a fan for a long, long time—so long that I was one of those people who had multiple VCRs connected to the TV and had scheduled recordings setup to record my favorite shows. (Until that blessed day came when DVRs became a thing.) But TV is just so great right now, with most of the best shows really taking advantage of that long-form serial format, where you tell one large story over the course of a season or the like.

Overall, I feel like the biggest competitor for short fiction’s audience is not TV or film (or novels), but social media. Before social media, if you were stuck in a line somewhere, or you had to kill some time before an appointment or the like, a fan of short fiction might have spent that time reading a bunch of short stories on their phone or ebook reader; but now it feels like most people would just kill that time looking at (or posting on) Twitter or Facebook. I mean, hell, even I do that fairly often, and I have to read thousands of stories every year.

How in the hell do you read thousands of stories each year, as well as for your anthology projects and book imprint? You must have to Clockwork Orange your way through everything!

If I had to finish reading everything I started reading, I’d definitely have to Clockwork Orange my way through everything, but thankfully, once I realize something isn’t right for me, I can stop reading it. (Unless it’s one of those Book 2s I mentioned earlier that was bought sight unseen as part of a multi-book deal and it happens to be terrible . . . fortunately, I haven’t had that experience yet!)

But, you know, it’s not easy! It helps, of course, that I really have a strong sense of what I like and don’t like, so I’m able to make decisions quickly. Unfortunately, sometimes I make those decisions too quickly and I later regret them—for instance, a couple of times I rejected a story when it was submitted to Lightspeed and then when I saw it in another magazine when I was reading for BASFF, I thought it was one of the best of the year and put it in my top eighty. (And then when I realized I had rejected it, I felt pretty foolish. I mean, not because I can’t admit I was wrong, but just because I look at the story now and can’t imagine how I could have passed on such a gem.)

Unfortunately, in order to accommodate all of my reading, one of the things that’s had to be curtailed is how often I keep the magazines open to unsolicited submissions. These days, we only do one or two open reading periods a year. I’d like us to stay open more often, but it’s so much work when we are that it’s really tough to manage it, because even with slush readers it takes so much of my attention. But it’s important to me to be able to discover new writers, so that’ll never go away completely. I’m still trying to figure out how to balance everything I’m doing, to be honest; I’m hoping that at some point soon I’ll be able to bring on a part-time in-house assistant that can help take some of the administrative stuff off of my plate so I can spend more time on editorial matters.

Going back to what we were saying about TV shows, you’d Tweeted about getting the show The Expanse picked up by another network when it looked like it was going to be canceled for good. What do you like about this show?

It’s basically the smartest, most sophisticated space-oriented science fiction show ever. Don’t get me wrong—I love Star Trek (particularly Next Generation and Deep Space Nine)—but as noted above, I much prefer that kind of long-form serial storytelling as opposed to the standalone episode format that Star Trek had. And of course, The Expanse is nearer future, and deals with technology more realistically in a way that makes the future it depicts seem much more plausible. Plus, it’s gritty, which I love, and I think the cast is really great, and the special effects are some of the best I’ve seen. To say nothing of the space battles, which are just mind-bogglingly arresting to watch. And it’s a faithful adaptation of the source material to boot.

Taki to Amazon Studios for coming in to save the show from extinction! (“Taki” means “thanks” in the Belter creole, which I admit to Googling, and then spent, like, ten minutes trying to figure out how to say “extinction” or some version of “destroy,” but gave up.)

So when you’re not watching TV shows, editing, or anthologizing, do you get time to reread your favorite short stories and novels? You’ve mentioned in previous interviews how much you love Chuck Palahniuk’s “Guts” and Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination. Do you get something new out of each reread? Sometimes when I return to a favorite book or short story, I pick up on details I missed the first times, or my interpretation changes because I’ve gotten older or spent time away from the story.

Maybe I don’t mention it enough, but as far as short (science) fiction goes, my favorite story is “Flowers for Algernon”; I’m aware of the book version, of course, but for my money, everything that needed to be said was said in the novelette version—it’s basically perfect.

Which I note since “Guts” is not at all a Lightspeed sort of story (a Nightmare story, sure!). But yes, I do love “Guts,” and it is short enough that I have re-read it a couple of times just on a whim—usually when someone starts talking about it like we are now, and it gets stuck in my head, and I just can’t exorcise it from my brainmeats until I go read it again. If you haven’t, and you enjoy (non-supernatural) horror, it’s on Chuck’s website (bit.ly/1hiUK3S) so you can go read it at your leisure. Though fair warning: I’m about as stalwart a reader as can be when it comes to horror, and this story makes me squirm.

But anyway! I don’t know that I get anything new out of it on each re-read, but it’s not exactly a subtle story (and it’s quite short), so maybe it’s not the best example. One of my favorite stories I’ve ever published is Jake Kerr’s “Biographical Fragments of the Life of Julian Prince” (bit.ly/2vkOyoi) (Lightspeed, March 2013), and that’s one that I’ve re-read multiple times (including during the editing process) that I feel like I discovered new layers to a couple of times. It’s interesting, too, because how much of it is actually on the page versus what is the sort of meta-narrative you construct in your head as you read it is up for debate; that kind of weird ambiguity of it, where the story leaves so much of the world surrounding the story unsaid is what I love about it so much—it’s about 5,000 words, but feels like a whole novel.

The Stars My Destination, of course, has long been my favorite novel—it blew my head apart as an eighteen- or nineteen-year-old discovering it when I was first taking some tentative steps into reading science fiction. I’ve hardly reread any novels in my life, with there being so many out there to read that I haven’t read yet, but Stars is one I have indeed read multiple times; I believe I’ve read it four times. Including once, aloud, to my then-girlfriend-now-wife, when we were dating long-distance; we read each other our favorite novels just by recording us reading and sending an mp3 of it to the other (she read me James Morrow’s Only Begotten Daughter). Though, again, I’m not sure if I picked up new things per se, though it’s possible and I just can’t think of it off the top of my head.

One of my more recent favorites, which is absolutely one of the best books I’ve ever read, is Ka by John Crowley, and that is a book I would fully expect to find new depths in each time I read it. It’s really a truly stunning work, and one that if there’s any justice in literature, we’ll be talking about for years and years to come. As I write this, it recently won the Mythopoeic Award and was named as a finalist for the World Fantasy Award; if it doesn’t win the latter, I’ll be very surprised—it’s one of those books that has World Fantasy written all over it.

I wish I had more time to reread favorites; I doubt that will ever change, though, unless I retire from editing!

What’s something that today’s John Joseph Adams would like to tell 2010 John Joseph Adams about working on Lightspeed? It doesn’t have to be advice, but something that’s surprised you about editing and publishing online magazines.

Well, the first thing that would surprise 2010 John Joseph Adams would be that he’d end up as a publisher at all! That was never in the plan for me; I never had any particular interest in doing that in my career—I just wanted to edit! If I hadn’t taken that leap, though, both Lightspeed and Nightmare would have been discontinued years ago, so I’m glad I did.

Another thing 2010 JJA would likely be surprised by is the aforementioned critical success we had right out of the gates, with all those accolades just in that first issue, but then also that over the years we’d accumulate such a huge number of Nebula nominees (eighteen, including at least one every year since we started publishing except for this year, in which we were shut out for the first time), though if we’re being completely honest here, I’d say he’d also be surprised that we wouldn’t have won one by now with that many finalists!

Though I think the biggest surprise for JJA 2010 would be that he would end up marrying one of his assistant editors—and on the same day and at the same venue as George R. R. Martin to boot! (Editor’s Note: Everyone survived both weddings.)

Any upcoming anthologies, novels from your imprint, and other projects that you can tell us about?

This month, John Joseph Adams Books is releasing The Spaceship Next Door by Gene Doucette, and then in October we have In the Night Wood by Dale Bailey, and in November Creatures of Want and Ruin by Molly Tanzer. Naturally, we’ve got a great slate of stuff lined up in 2019 as well—including books by Micah Dean Hicks, Jack Skillingstead, Ashok K. Banker, Bryan Camp, Peter Cawdron, and Greg Bear—and in 2020, we’ll have Divergent author Veronica Roth’s debut adult novel (which we announced in July).

My next anthology to come out is going to be Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018, with guest editor N. K. Jemisin, in October.

In 2019, an anthology I co-edited with Victor LaValle will be published by Random House’s One World imprint in February, called A People’s Future of the United States, which we’re pitching as “an anthology of twenty-five original speculative fiction stories that challenge oppressive narratives and imagine a future in which the country is shaped by justice and freedom.” And also, of course, HMH will release BASFF 2019.

Otherwise for anthologies, I’ve got a couple of other things in the pipeline that I can’t quite talk about yet, but I will have at least the three mentioned above out in 2019, and in 2020 it’s looking like there will be five (four original anthologies, plus BASFF). So though I took a dip in anthology production in 2018, looks like I’ll be bouncing back in the near future! And of course, there’ll be twelve more issues of both Lightspeed and Nightmare—and then I guess before you know it, we’ll be celebrating Nightmare’s hundredth issue, too.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Christian A. Coleman is a 2013 graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop. He lives and writes in the Boston area. He tweets at @coleman_II.

Author Spotlight: Vylar Kaftan

Gordon B. White | 737 words

As this story does, let us start even before the beginning. What was the spark of inspiration led to this story’s creation? Was there a particular mythology or other system that you were drawing from?

This one has an unusual origin. I was on Codex, a message board for pro and neo-pro writers, and people wanted to see how to write a story from start to finish. From idea to sale. I have one very odd talent: I can explain what I’m doing and why, without damaging my process. So I tracked the brainstorming process, the plot development, the drafting, and the entire editing process. I kept every draft to show the differences. I might release it as a chapbook sometime.

Anyway, this story came about because I wanted to write more epic short fiction, like “The Orange-Tree Sacrifice.” I love discovering just how much can fit inside a short story. I didn’t have a particular myth in mind (though I’m a huge fan of mythology). I just wanted to discover space mythology.

The setting here is especially intriguing. Your prose adopts a traditional cadence, almost like a fable, but the actual setting around the gods and monsters is conveyed in terms of academic cosmology and physics. How did you come up with that approach? Were there any particular inspirations that you looked to in this regard?

I’m a scientific pantheist. Science is awesome—literally. It inspires awe in me, much the way that I suspect many people are inspired by more traditional religious teachings. So for me, it only makes sense to craft the stories our ancestors might have, had they known more about the universe we live in.

I was fascinated with the way this story takes place in a continuous temporal narrative but still shifts between lenses. On the surface, there is the immediate combat of Ammuya and the Monster, which reads at a breakneck pace, but, when we readers step away, we realize that these enormous entities are locked in a slow-moving dance that obliterates trillions of lives over long periods of time. This had the effect of making your nonhuman characters more immediate, but at the same time more distant. Was it your intent to create both empathy and distance for these cosmic entities and the concepts they represent?

Yes.

Oh, I need to elaborate? Okay. Yes, that’s pretty much it. The epic becomes comprehensible; the specific becomes timeless.

This story presents an interesting exploration of the difference between creation, development, and change. The Monster is born different, but it seems to be the torment that he suffers at his siblings’ hands that leads him to develop into a “monster.” Ammuya changes over the course of the story, too, although her change comes through her own self-awareness and a self-reckoning that finds a seed of empathy present in the title. In the end, although the Monster and Ammuya are delivered into their final form—the birth of the new universe—it could still be read as seemingly against the Monster’s will, since he fell victim to Ammuya’s trap. Although set with love and seemingly validated through the last lines of dialogue, it has the same effect as the earlier torments—forcing the Monster into an unwilling change. Should readers ponder over whether the failure to let the Monster decide for himself will re-instate the circle of destruction in the reborn universe? Or can this kind of change lead to a positive outcome if the intentions are pure?

“The conclusion is left as an exercise for the reader.”

Though if you ask me, I’d call attention to the fact that while the Monster was trapped, the effect was that he perceived truth. He understood what was happening and asked for help. Whether or not he retains free will at this point is a question for the reader (or for advanced philosophy coursework).

Finally, what’s next on your horizon? Beyond any concrete plans or upcoming releases, are there any new and inchoate ideas that you’re eager to explore?

Currently I’m most excited about the formation of identity in pressured circumstances, telepathic love affairs, and the best new games on the Nintendo Switch.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Gordon B. White has lived in North Carolina, New York, and the Pacific Northwest. He is a 2017 graduate of the Clarion West Writing Workshop, and his fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in venues such as Daily Science Fiction, A Breath from the Sky: Unusual Stories of Possession, Nightscript Vol. 2, and the Bram Stoker Award® winning anthology Borderlands 6. Gordon is also an Assistant Editor with Kraken Press and conducts reviews and interviews for various outlets. You can find him online at gordonbwhite.com or on Twitter at @GordonBWhite.

Author Spotlight: Genevieve Valentine

Setsu Uzumé | 834 words

While I was reading, the title kept knocking around in my mind, both in terms of “abandoned [software/children]” and “with abandon.” What was the first idea or image that seeded this story?

The thing that seeded this story was a moment in Brent Watanabe’s San Andreas Deer Cam, which hacked a version of Grand Theft Auto to make the POV character a deer. I watched it for two hours straight the first time I saw it; when it walked into the ocean and I realized that I was trying to determine the exact moment it had died, I got unsettled enough to close the window. I never shook that experience and that image, though, and since nobody I know was watching it at that moment, it quickly took on a fever-dream quality in my memory. And the more my memory begins to fail me, the more I’ve started to think about how unreal experiences can fuck with and even come to define perception of the real. The need to understand things is so powerful, about such strange things; sometimes it can eat your whole life.

Christine plays with changing identities through Kass, almost the same way her father does so with a new house, wife, and kid named Chrissy. Does the deer catch Christine’s attention because it defies reality in a similar, albeit absurd way?

I think it can be incredibly tempting to predicate or subsume identity on things we have control over; ultimately the chance to define—to name, to understand—is what Christine is hunting for, more than any actual answers about Vanished and Gone (which she doesn’t play) or Fallow (which may or may not be real). For me, the deer in this context isn’t a symbol for Christine herself so much as it is a harbinger forcing her to consider things she has been clearly working very hard not to consider; the pixelated equivalent of a long drive on an empty highway on a flat landscape, which tends to become a hypnotic exercise after long enough, and pull you back into memories you might rather forget.

The deer and the shoe reminded me of the charming animal companions in Disney movies, leading the investigator to the mysterious slipper—such heinous implications for an ostensibly serene prey-animal. Was that why it was linked to Pioneer?

The deer and shoe connection didn’t even occur to me, but I dig this reading! The shoe was actually part of the work I did making the larger framework of the game, which I mapped out in a ridiculous level of detail even though very little of it makes it here, because that is just who I am as a person. Christine’s increasing fascination with the game itself, alongside her fear of actually playing it, makes a liminal space for Christine’s own not-quite-articulated fears to come up as potential game moments (it’s that long drive on a flat landscape).

The way she interacts with Rhodey, Kass, Divorce, and the Deer (in its unstoppable randomness) was striking. Would you say that each toy’s consciousness is a result of her loss of control over her own life, or does her arc take a different direction?

I wouldn’t say every child is internally a little poisonous when they start trying to interact with the world on adult terms, but some children are, and a slightly poisonous child is, for me, the most interesting kind.

You’ve spoken before on the differences between writing fiction, articles, and comic books. Are there any techniques from one mode of writing that help sharpen the others? Can someone become a more agile storyteller, or work through their blind spots, through that breadth of experience?

If there are any techniques from one that sharpen the others, they’re probably not for me to say; the experience of each one is very different, but no one is the best judge of their own success—just the nature of being inside one of the experiences. I suppose, by all means, try them all—if you enjoy one, then it’s helped you, and congratulations!

Do you have a favorite video game? Are there properties you’re a fan of that you’d like to write for?

I have played almost no video games, actually! (RIP Pac-Man at the Pizza Hut near my house when I was six.) As someone with anxiety about the overwhelming variables of real life, I am in general a poor candidate for being on the experience end of things that involve overwhelming variables. For exactly those reasons, though, things like video games and immersive theater fascinate me from a creative and logistical perspective; how they work and what they do in practice is incredibly interesting to me.

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: Carrie Vaughn

Sandra Odell | 871 words

Harry and Marlowe are long time reader companions. Tell us about the inspiration behind “Harry & Marlowe and the Secret Island of Ahomana,” the latest in their adventures.

I had a bit of an assignment with this one, to write a “lost world” story—and since that type of story was a staple of Victorian genre writing, it seemed natural to send Harry and Marlowe on that adventure. This is the trope where European explorers discover a secret civilization hidden away in parts of the world deemed remote and unlikely. Of course I wanted to do what I could to subvert the trope, which is problematic in so many ways. Harry and Marlowe have been traveling the world searching for evidence that the Aetherian aliens landed elsewhere and left behind artifacts. They crash on a South Pacific island where they find what amounts to a hybridized Pacific Islander and Aetherian culture. As a good Victorian royal, Harry’s first instinct is to conquer—this amazing technology is hers by right. She has to question that impulse.

Writing an ongoing series of stories with reoccurring characters set in the same world is a wonderful treat for readers but can be something of a challenge. How do you manage to juggle issues such as character growth and plot development versus the need to create a tale to satisfy readers old and new?

I’ve done this a couple of times now, with my Kitty novels in particular, and I find it really helpful to have some kind of arc in mind, to know where these stories are ultimately headed. Each story is its own adventure and has its own objectives. But I also have an end point in mind, an ultimate goal or destination where I would like to send these characters. This gives me a framework where I can plant seeds for future stories and tie loose ends together. It doesn’t always go the way I expect, but there’s some direction at least. This story is actually a big step on that arc.

As with each of the Harry and Marlowe stories, you blend matters of colonialism and feminism with the existence and dignity of indigenous peoples. What is the most difficult part of crafting a story that takes what many would consider to be dissimilar elements while maintaining the pulp/steampunk tone?

This is really the first Harry and Marlowe story that’s tackled colonialism head-on, and I hope I did the topic some justice. Really, I could only write Victorian-inspired adventure stories for so long without addressing colonialism. Many commentators have noted that steampunk offers a chance to deconstruct and subvert many of the received tropes of Victorian adventure stories—we can create alternate timelines, alternate histories, examine and subvert institutions like colonialism that more traditional stories take for granted. The attraction and appeal of so many Victorian adventure stories is the adventure, the tales of derring-do against a backdrop of elegant manners and formality. It’s possible to take those tropes and feature great characters who aren’t traditionally seen in heroic roles, and to set them in places we don’t normally see in those stories—and to treat those places with respect. In a way, one antagonist of these stories becomes the traditional tropes we’re trying to recover and turn into something new and fresh.

Had you been in Harry and Marlowe’s place, would you have been able to keep your promise to Moea?

To be perfectly honest, if I had been in Harry’s place I might not have left the island at all. I think Marlowe has it right, here.

On your website, you mention that your imagination really took flight when your mother gave you Red Planet and your father let you watch 2001. When did you start writing, exploring worlds of your own?

Oh, I think my imagination took flight way before that! (I remember dreams I had when I was very very young, and they were doozies.) All the science fiction I grew up with just gave it a direction to go. I started writing pretty young—the first thing I did identifiable as a story, I wrote when I was eight. It was basically a retelling of The Black Stallion with a girl horse instead of a boy horse. Sign of things to come, I think.

You are so very prolific, what do you do to help recharge your writing batteries?

Oh, but I have so many things I haven’t written yet . . . I try to spend a lot of time outside. I birdwatch, ride horses. Reading of course. Binge-watch British mystery series. I also do a lot of crafting—knitting, sewing, and so forth. I find using my hands is important to balance out all the time I spend using my brain on stories and writing. Also, the instant gratification of creating something in a few hours or days rather than the weeks and months it takes to write a story or novel is incredibly satisfying and helps keep me sane.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Sandra Odell is a 47-year old, happily married mother of two, an avid reader, compulsive writer, and rabid chocoholic. Her work has appeared in such venues as Jim Baen’s UNIVERSE, Daily Science Fiction, Crosssed Genres, Pseudopod, and The Drabblecast. She is hard at work plotting her second novel or world domination. Whichever comes first.

Author Spotlight: Cadwell Turnbull

Alex Puncekar | 875 words

What was the inspiration behind this story?

Much like the beginning of the story, I was walking with my significant other and the thought came to me: What if we could teleport right now? My wife laughed at me, but it led to a really great conversation about what it would mean if it only happened once with no way to actually prove it. I wouldn’t be able to let go, I had said. That experience would be too profound for me. My wife had a more “let the mystery be” perspective. I thought her perspective was better than mine. The idea stayed with me for a long time and eventually I decided to write it. I wanted to explore what that difference of opinion would do to a relationship.

There are elements in this story that allow readers to see “Jump” as being about more than just teleportation and a couple’s struggles with it. It’s also accessible enough that readers can miss some of that subtext and still get an entertaining read. Did you write “Jump” with that intention in mind or was this a happy accident?

Pretty early on it became apparent that I was exploring a lot more with this story. My initial goal was to explore the speculative element and its effects, but I soon found myself interested in how the story works as metaphor. A moment of inexplicable teleportation is exciting, but it also stands in for so many things in our lives that become so big they eclipse what matters.

Mike represents masculine ideas I’m continually challenging in myself, this need to have what he wants at the center of everything, this over-valuing of his own perspective at the expense of everyone else’s. It is a very male quality and one I wanted to deconstruct in myself and on the page. Mike values big moments beyond all the little moments that add up to a life, and he and everyone around him suffers for it.

On the other hand, Jessie is a much more mature character and takes a less reductive view of the magic at the beginning of their relationship. She wants change. She wants evolution and she is much more comfortable with taking new life events as they come. The jump is indeed magical for her, but she tries to accept that while moving forward and not devalue herself because of it. That perspective surpasses a fleeting moment of magic.

By the end of it, they find themselves at a new crossroads. It is ambiguous whether Mike has learned anything or what will happen to their relationship moving forward. We don’t even know if the magic has truly returned. But I think the magic is the least important part of the ending. In other versions of the story, I took a stronger stance (one positive, one negative) but I think it is better to leave it at the crossroads. I like the questions it ends with: Can things once broken be mended? Can a person or relationship be redeemed?

Why was teleportation the chosen form of travel for these two characters, as opposed to the myriad of other SF options out there?

I love fiction that explores spatial, dimensional, and time travel. However, each has a different effect on a story. They explore different themes. Teleportation worked for these characters and this story because it is fleeting, over in an instant. Often writers will use it as a superpower, or an answer to long-distance travel, or to explore philosophical questions about who actually shows up on the other end, but I was more interested in the fleeting moment itself, and what it would mean if you couldn’t repeat it. If a character travels through time or dimensions, the conversation shifts towards whether the character will get back to their time or their universe. But if a character teleports without explanation or recurrence in a world like ours, the conversation shifts towards the exploration of the miraculous and how it affects that individual on a personal level.

Can you talk about any other projects you’re working on?

Well, I just finished edits on my first novel. It is called The Lesson and is about an alien colonization in the U.S. Virgin Islands in the near future. Set mostly on my home island of St. Thomas, the novel explores how contact with alien life can alter the beliefs, politics, and fates of people in a small place. It is also a critique of colonialism. It will be out in June 2019.

Along with revising a few short stories, I’m also working on a second novel. This one will be urban fantasy. I’ve described it as a modern retelling of the civil rights movement of the ’60s and ’70s, but with monsters. One of the main characters of the novel will be a soucouyant, a blood-sucking entity from Caribbean folklore. I wrote about her in my short story “Loneliness is in Your Blood” and I thought it would be interesting to revisit her story within the context of a larger social revolution.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Alex Puncekar is a writer, game designer, and editorial assistant for both Lightspeed and Nightmare. His fiction has appeared in Aphelion: The Webzine of Science Fiction and Fantasy and Jenny Magazine. He lives in Cinncinati, Ohio. Follow him on Twitter @AlexPuncekar.

Author Spotlight: Adam-Troy Castro

Jude Griffin | 665 words

How did this story come about?

Sometimes I have an answer to that question, sometimes I don’t, and sometimes I have an answer and find that it cannot be shared. This alas falls into the third category. I find that this story, which I’ve attempted and failed and attacked again for nigh unto twenty years, only to conquer it upon this last assault, is a thing with a provenance I can share with friends, but, for reasons of taste, not with the world at large, not now at any rate. It will have to stand for itself.

I can say this much. I have long used as a story generation tool the personal premise of “secret sequels,” tales that take place in the worlds of various stories by others, all important to me, but not belonging to me. I use the original as jumping-off point, then file off the serial numbers, secure that what I’ve brought to the canvas is sufficient to justify the tale as entirely mine, without being slavish carbon copy. It is a function of asking the question, “What would happen next?”

Non-writers might say that this is plagiarism. No, it is not. It is feedback, the same phenomenon that might lead one writer to wonder what the sweet young girl who comes of age in the story of another might be like if everything went wrong and she was left bitter and disappointed atw fifty. There might be no dead giveaway in the second story about its origins in the first. It exists as such only in the heart of the creator.

This tale is, as far as I’m concerned, a secret sequel to a certain classic work of science fiction, and it was always my intent on writing it that when it was released into the world, I would be open about which one. This proves untenable by circumstance. So consider it an editorial reply, but it is doomed to stand for itself.

When I read “orgynism” in the first line, I thought it signaled the whole of the story, but the expected “gyn” element never appeared. What’s behind that word then?

You have tracked the coinage to the wrong root. You are focusing on “gyn” and looking for the female element. The root word is not that but “orgy,” making an “orgynism” a permanent group rut fused into a single colony being. The kind of thing people would try in a world of exhausted surfeit.

Each fascinating self-contained scene of weirdness seems to stand alone, but were there subtexts? A thread that connected them to the whole?

They are the different forms of distraction to be found in a world where everybody had experienced everything.

When I reflected on the story arc and how it ended, it felt almost like the story of an amiable nihilist in the end days. What was it about for you?

It would be unfair to nihilists to call this guy a nihilist. He doesn’t stand for even that much. (This is a world where you can say, “Say what you will about nihilism, Dude . . . at least it’s an ethos.”) He’s just a guy looking for a new flavor in the end times, when there’s nothing left to do and all the forms of amusement have palled.

Is there anything else you would like readers to know about this story?

About the story, I think I’ve said all I can say—not all there is to say, but all I can say—above. I will, however, say something about the enterprise which hosts it. It has been an honor to be such a heavy contributor over the years, a pleasure to read so many of the great stories that have appeared here, and both my hope and my ambition that the best is yet to come.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Jude Griffin is an envirogeek, writer, and photographer. She trained llamas at the Bronx Zoo; was a volunteer EMT, firefighter, and HAZMAT responder; worked as a guide and translator for journalists covering combat in Central America; lived in a haunted village in Thailand; ran an international frog monitoring network; and loves happy endings. Bonus points for frolicking dogs and kisses backlit by a shimmering full moon.

Author Spotlight: Maria Dahvana Headley

Jude Griffin | 2020 words

How did this story come about?

I was telling a story at dinner about the first time I met a magician, which happened at a children’s birthday party when I was in kindergarten. My friends had many questions about why I hadn’t written the story yet, and I figured out that it was because I was the angry magic-denied protagonist of the original, and that the story I wanted to tell was the story of the magician, not the audience. I’d had to grow into that story of middle age, of longing, of disappointments, of attempts at change. The real-life birthday party was much like the one that happens in “You Pretend Like You Never Met Me”—except in that case, I was the little girl who asked the magician to raise the dead.

One of our classmates had very recently died in a motorcycle accident, and I believed in magic. It seemed absolutely plausible to me that the birthday magician would be able to bring my friend back. The balloon animals he tried to give us instead launched a revolt with a whole lot of tears and meltdown. We were all smashed cake, grief, and fury. I’ve been thinking about that moment for thirty-five years, apparently, because I’ve really never gotten over how the teachers told us about death. It was during story time, the day after our friend died, and the teacher cupped her hands with a small ball inside them, shaking around, to help us understand how his helmet hadn’t protected his brain. We’d thought a helmet would keep you safe. And then to have someone throw a birthday party for their kid in the same week as a funeral of another kid? It’s not a good plan.

Of course, as a parent myself, I think now about the parents of the boy who died, as much as about the boy. What kind of terrible trajectory of a mistake, to take your child on a motorcycle, to have him die, to live yourself? That dynamic is something I’ve written about a lot (The End of the Sentence, for example, has a story like this in it) and it all comes from this incident in my childhood, though it’s likely been made more profound by my own experiences with parenthood. I was a constant wreck, thinking about bad things that might happen to my stepkids, and I had worst-case plans for every kind of danger to them. My new novel, The Mere Wife, which is an adaptation of Beowulf, begins with Grendel’s mother being terrified for her small son’s safety, and for her, every decision she makes is about the horror of giving birth to someone even more vulnerable than she is.

I don’t know what happened to the family that lost their son. I changed schools soon after, but before I did, the father visited my classroom and sat in the corner weeping. I don’t know what happened to that poor magician either, but here are some thoughts on a painful, unexpected, Hail Mary pass of a redemption for everyone.

Caro and Wells, so beautifully drawn: Did the characters develop in your mind separately or was one honed in counterpoint to the other?

The other origin of this story is an ongoing semi-comedic wrathriff by an Englishman in my life. His fury at American tea-brewing practices is so significant that for years now, I’ve been forced to conclude that properly brewed tea is magical, and improperly brewed tea equally magical, but in the opposite way. “THE WATER MUST BE BOILING!!!” is a direct quote from him.

I’ve been wanting to put it in a story about magicians for ages—in truth, tea-brewing is a deeply fantastical topic unto itself, and it really wants to be thrown into the guts of a novel about colonialist invasions involving expeditioneers in pith helmets, in which the brewing of tea is an act of taming the witchery of the tea leaves themselves, as well as an act of trespass into tea-free cultures, and maybe I will write it, because it begs for a take, but I so digress.

In any case, the notion of a rage about tea was the genesis of Caro for me, and somehow it made perfect sense that an Englishwoman would be raging about tea in a biker bar somewhere in America, so I started digging into why her rage would be as dire as it is. The story hinges on loss of status, loss of privilege, loss of love, for both Wells and Caro, and they embody those concepts in different ways. We all have grief in our lives, and more often than not, the things we grieve and rage over are similar, no matter where we come from.

I had the notion of Wells traveling with his magician father, the son of someone much more magical than he is, and of Caro and her own son traveling together with her husband, who ultimately makes this horrible mistake. In a world that has magic in it, this one, our own, I’m always interested in the ways that characters are not saved by magic. My characters are always still their flawed, fucked up, drunk and disorderly selves, no matter the magic in the mix, and that’s what I was interested in when I was writing this story.

The bright yellow lemon car, the lemon suit: Where did they come from? (It made me expect clowns and pratfalls. Thank you for not succumbing.)

This interview is apparently a course in writer-brain and the way writer brains transform entire histories into fiction! The lemon elements here came originally from a lemonade stand in Idaho, one that, when I was a teenager, was a huge draw, because of the girl who worked at it. The stand was lemon-shaped, and the girl was gorgeous, dressed in lemon yellow, and had lemon yellow hair. She somehow managed to be both voluptuously innocent and palpably good, and also, you know, a living lemon.

Every man in Idaho wanted lemonade that summer, and the next summer the lemonade stand was gone. I kept wondering, as a teenager, how that girl, the lemon, felt about being the most desired lemon in the desert. So, my brain dipped that in reality and here we have the remnants of a repossessed lemonade stand business, repurposed into the life of Wells the Magician.

The car comes from the idiom of a bad car being a lemon, and I suspect my brain was having fun tracking that back into Wells, already frustrated and fucked up, driving the most undignified theme car.

Somewhere also in my teenage years, my father set me up on an unexpected date with the thirty-year-old son of his former business partner. This was an obvious mess, but I have memories of asking this guy what his biggest dream was, and him telling me that it was to own, with his beloved, a hotdog stand shaped like a hotdog, and also to drive a hotdog-shaped vehicle. Some people’s best dreams are other people’s nightmares. The idea of a lemon suit worn as ice storm gear is just rural America in my mind, Norman Rockwell tilted into the back of the screen version where everyone’s pretty much wasted, horny, and trailing the remains of several failed attempts at Great American Normal.

All the unanswered questions, I want more: Will there be more?

I’m thinking about adapting this into a film script, actually. So, maybe! I’d like to see this onscreen. A magician is something that is as pleasing to see on a screen as to imagine from prose, and I’d love to see the failures and the glories—at one point Wells’ father floats naked over the heads of a casino, looking at people’s hands in order to cheat at cards. I’d like to see more of that relationship, possibly, and maybe more of Caro’s life before her son’s death.

There are things you can do in a film that you can’t do in fiction, in terms of the feeling of a lost former life invading your present, you know what I mean? I love the way cinema can layer stories, the same way memory can. Different mediums can reveal a lot, and it’s always fun to use the same story for more than one form.

Any news or projects you want to share?

My new novel, The Mere Wife, is out in the world, and I’m very excited for that. It’s a different take on Americana than the one in this story, but has some things in common with it. I’m always interested in divisions between the hopeful and the hopeless. That one’s Beowulf, police violence, gated communities, feminist fury, and class hierarchy in the suburbs.

And next summer, my new translation of Beowulf itself will be published by FSG, so that’s thrilling! I’ve been very lucky over the past few years to see several massive, unlikely dreams actually becoming reality. I have two novels in progress, and another one that’s still totally secret, but ready to be started.

I think part of the reason I’ve written this story about Wells and Caro changing their lives at forty or so is that I’ve spent the past few years really changing my own life, or rather doubling down furiously on the best parts of myself from when I was a teenager, when I had no limit on my dreams for joy. Experience is a teacher, but can also be a limiter, and one of the glories of the past few years for me is that I find that I believe in magic again.

My magic has always been the same kind of magic—the magic of hard work and devotion, of treating my work like I’m learning sorcery and like it is as powerful as a huge spell for raising the dead, but hey. It still feels like magic in the end, when you get to publish books and stories like the ones I’m getting to publish these days.

I’ve been so lucky to be supported by some of the fiercest and most amazing people in the business, very much including John Joseph Adams, who’s taken risks on this strange mind over and over again. I feel very damn grateful.

It’s especially cool to publish this story in the 100th issue of Lightspeed, because it is an echo of the first story I published in Lightspeed, back in 2012. “Give Her Honey When You Hear Her Scream” also has a magician in it, and a lot of working class magic, messy magic, magic done in diners and car seats. I have a jones for working class magic. I don’t like the notion of nobility, of legacy magic. I want it to be the dirty thing it looks like from broke America, poverty-level dustbowl sorcery, in fact, and that comes from my own history, but also from a lot of rebellion against structures that say miracles are only possible for those with money.

It also has love, but the lovers in that story are not the main characters. The magician and the witch, the dumped partners of the lovers, are the ones who do major action throughout the story. In this one, two people who aren’t lovers or even partners, but could be, attempt to change everything about the rules of life and death, in order to save someone. I like that here a magician delves into miracles. I like that love is the reason throughout my work, for trying to make the impossible possible. It’s that way in my life, too. That’s why I do this thing.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Jude Griffin is an envirogeek, writer, and photographer. She trained llamas at the Bronx Zoo; was a volunteer EMT, firefighter, and HAZMAT responder; worked as a guide and translator for journalists covering combat in Central America; lived in a haunted village in Thailand; ran an international frog monitoring network; and loves happy endings. Bonus points for frolicking dogs and kisses backlit by a shimmering full moon.

Author Spotlight: Ken Liu

Christie Yant | 989 words

Welcome back, Ken! You’re our fourth most-published author at Lightspeed—tied for first, if we count your translations! We’re so grateful that you’ve been with us from the start, and thrilled to have you back for our 100th issue.

A pleasure to be back! Congrats on the 100th issue and thank you for having me again. Lightspeed has been such an important part of my career, and I’m honored to be part of the celebration of this milestone.

One of the things I love about “The Explainer” is how easily Tingting adapted to the presence of Allie, and was both the only accurate observer of Allie’s behavior and an active participant in it. For her mother, Allie was a tool; for Tingting, Allie was a presence. We know that children adapt to new technologies more readily than adults; how do you think smart technologies might affect the kids growing up with them today?

My daughters are infinitely more comfortable with “smart” technology than I am. They have conversations with Alexa and know what kind of things trip her up; they have her tell them stories (something I didn’t know she could do); they have very strong opinions about the relative merits of Alexa, Siri, and their colleagues; they know how to mute the listening devices when they don’t want to accidentally trigger one of them . . .

As I’ve grown older, I have less and less time to explore and play with technology the way I used to—that’s the cost of adulting. But the only way to truly feel comfortable with a technology, to be able to “hack” it, is to devote lots of time to playing with it.

So I think kids growing up today surrounded by “smart” devices have an intuition about the potentials and limitations of AI that I won’t have. They’ll be able to hack it far more naturally than I can. I think it’s an important survival skill—many, many industries are in the process of being transformed by AI, and knowing how to navigate a landscape of ubiquitous AI will be critical in life and in work.

You’ve written other stories about smart homes and AI with a cautionary theme. As Siri, Alexa, Google, and Nest continue to gain in popularity, do you think the risks outweigh the benefits?

I actually enjoy chatting with Alexa (and Cortana, to a lesser extent)—Siri . . . eh, not so much.

I believe it’s much too early to effectively weigh the benefits and costs of consumer AI. The benefits are nascent and the risks underdeveloped. I suppose it’s possible to argue from the precautionary principle that we ought to be much more suspicious about such technology, but I’m always reminded of Plato’s objections to writing—he was right about all the dangers of writing as a technology; yet, he was also spectacularly wrong.

Will AI end up changing the way we think in a profound manner? Maybe. The way we think has already been drastically transformed by mass media, by the internet, by social media, by ubiquitous computing—we are all cyborgs now to some extent, with much of our knowledge and mental patterns externalized in silicon. Concepts about privacy already differ in radical ways across generations. Ultimately, it’s our children who will decide what all this means for humanity, not us.

You’ve often used an imposed structure in your writing, and this story has a strong rhythm to it. Was the choice of “The Three Little Pigs” part of that storycraft?

Yes! I wanted to give the story itself that fairy tale structure of rhythmic resistance and discovery. It’s always more fun to have structure mirror the content.

Also, I wanted to tell a story about narrative AI because storytelling has always seemed to me the quintessential human skill. I can’t wait until the day AI can tell compelling, wondrous stories. (No, I don’t think it means I’ll be out of a job then—I think it will be amazing to collaborate with an AI in crafting a novel, and I’m sure I’ll learn a lot.)

In addition to being a prolific author and translator, you’re also an editor, with a second anthology of Chinese science fiction soon due out from Tor. What can you tell us about that project?

Since the publication of Invisible Planets, the first anthology I edited, I’ve heard from many readers about wanting to read more Chinese SF. So I decided to do a second one.

For this second anthology, Broken Stars (bit.ly/2AuydTU), I ended up taking a slightly different editorial approach. I wanted to stretch and challenge readers a little bit by including stories that are more diverse and perhaps less “expected.” There are so many talented writers working in China today that there’s an embarrassment of riches. It’s fun to pick out stories that are maybe less accessible to the average Anglophone reader than stories in the first volume.

Any other news you’d like to share with our readers?

After many months, the end is in sight for the final volume of the Dandelion Dynasty, my silkpunk epic fantasy series. I’ve been working on the series now for close to a decade, and I feel both sad and happy as I get ready to say goodbye to this world and the characters. If I can stick to my schedule, the book should be out next year. And I can’t wait to share the conclusion of the saga with fans.

After that, I look forward to starting something very, very different.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Christie Yant is a science fiction and fantasy writer, Associate Publisher for Lightspeed and Nightmare, and guest editor of Lightspeed’s Women Destroy Science Fiction special issue. Her fiction has appeared in anthologies and magazines including Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2011 (Horton),  Armored, Analog Science Fiction & Fact, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, io9, Wired.com, and China’s Science Fiction World. Her work has received honorable mentions in Year’s Best Science Fiction (Dozois) and Best Horror of the Year (Datlow), and has been long-listed for StorySouth’s Million Writers Award. She lives on the central coast of California with two writers, an editor, and assorted four-legged nuisances. Follow her on Twitter @christieyant.

Author Spotlight: Sofia Samatar

Alex Puncekar | 876 words

I’m entranced by the premise of “Hard Mary.” What was your inspiration for this story? What was your writing process like?

The story started on Halloween. A distant cousin, who grew up Amish, told me about some folk beliefs she remembered from when she was young, concerning the eve of Old Christmas—that is, Christmas according to the old Julian calendar, or January 6. She told me that on that night, the animals speak, and if a young woman walks around the barn seven times, she’ll meet the man she’s going to marry. I immediately conceived the opening scene of “Hard Mary,” in which this group of girls goes out in midwinter to walk around the barn. However, instead of meeting any men, my girls tripped over a robot. I couldn’t figure out where to take the story from there. I put it aside for months. I actually thought I might never finish it, that it might just remain this weird fragment. The problem was that I couldn’t figure out what interested me about this encounter—was it the idea of Amish relations with technology, or women and marriage, or people and animals, or what? In the end, the story wound up addressing all of these things to some extent, but it came to life for me, and I returned to it with a will, once I realized it was a story about the construction of characters: that is, a story about writing.

This story is about many things, but one of them is how we give human-like personalities (much like Dr. Stoll himself says) to animals, inanimate objects, or, in the case of Hard Mary, machines to get closer or understand them more. Is this a theme that you feel strongly about?

Absolutely. As a fiction writer, I spend a lot of time granting consciousness to imaginary entities. But of course, this process isn’t unique to writers. I’m fascinated by the ways in which the creation of characters, something I practice in a specialized way, forms such a core part of the human experience. It happens when children make their toys talk. It’s there in the way we relate to our pets. And I’m especially interested in how it’s embedded in our use of technology, because I think this is going to become more and more important. Like when a person drops her phone, picks it up, and says “Oh, sorry!” and strokes it a little, as if comforting it—what’s going on there? And our massive science fiction literature on artificial intelligence. There are so many examples that suggest we don’t want our tools to just be machines. We want to relate to them. We want them to be like us.

The asides at the end of each section of the story read like poetry. My favorite was the section about The Object City. There was something so tactile and ephemeral about it. I know that these must be from Mary’s perspective, but are they her thoughts? Her past experiences? Maybe visions of the future?

These are some of the questions the story itself is asking. How does Mary the robot think? What does Mary know, how does she know, and how much of this knowledge can she communicate to human beings? Mary is subordinate to humans, because she depends on them for information, but she’s also superior, in that she can process it much faster. Through the sections that reveal her thoughts, we see her change rapidly as she switches her loyalty from Dr. Stoll, her creator, to Mim, the girl who finds her. Mim begins to replace Dr. Stoll in Mary’s memory. This is a way of questioning the reality of Mary’s past experiences, and by extension, the reality of everyone’s past experiences: It’s an old question about the relationship between consciousness and event.

In addition, Mary’s relationship with Mim and the other girls affects her language: She basically uploads the Bible, and so she begins to use language and imagery from that source. It’s her way of talking to her new friends in a language they can understand. But Mary’s language remains cryptic—poem-like, as you said. It’s opaque, because she knows so much more than the girls, more than any human being. She’s processing the world at such at advanced level that the information she reveals comes out veiled in mystery, like a prophet’s vision.

Thank you for taking the time to answer these questions. Can you talk about any other projects you’re working on?

I’ve been working on a book based on a surprising historical event: a migration of Mennonites from southern Russia to what’s now Uzbekistan in the 1880s. In between manuscript revisions, I’m writing short stories and essays. I expect to be in this space for at least another year. So there will be more stories. I’m not sure about what, but I know I’m not done thinking about the relationship between religion and technology, or power, or cultural change. Or brains. Or robots.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Alex Puncekar is a writer, game designer, and editorial assistant for both Lightspeed and Nightmare. His fiction has appeared in Aphelion: The Webzine of Science Fiction and Fantasy and Jenny Magazine. He lives in Cinncinati, Ohio. Follow him on Twitter @AlexPuncekar.

Author Spotlight: Sam J. Miller

Arley Sorg | 1083 words

I love that Cary’s power is birds. I love this as a metaphor for who he is, for his beauty, his sense of freedom, and more. How did this story start for you—what was the inspiration and how did it develop?

The story starts for me where it starts for the reader, with Taylor’s family frozen in time by grief. They’re stuck, and if she’s going to save herself—and her parents—she needs to come unstuck first. So Cary’s power being birds emerged as a sort of antithesis of that grief—the freedom and motion and beauty that went away when he died, and that Taylor finds a way to bring back into her world by the end of the story.

The sense of family in this piece is strong. Taylor Elizabeth’s family to be sure, but there is this strong sense of family brought out in the brief strokes of Hiram’s portrayal as well. The conflict and tension is sharp, but so is the sense of connection. How do you relate to these family situations?

For me one of the things that’s most poignant and powerful in YA lit is that it’s about the ways that becoming an adult puts us into conflict with our families. They might be amazing, or they might be terrible, but in the course of figuring out who the fuck we are, we need to go down some roads they would never choose for us, and may actively try to stop us from going down. And that tension, between who we are to our families, and who we are to ourselves, is such fertile ground for exploring character that I just keep coming back to it, in this as in many of my stories.

Violent death—especially murder—is something we see a lot of in media. But I feel like stories where death ultimately leads to self-discovery, acceptance, and empowerment, are rarer, especially without the blatant overtones of hate and vengeance. It reminds me of your Locus interview where you talked about “the power you get from loving yourself, loving the people around you, and acknowledging that you are amazing and you don’t need to hurt yourself.” Was this story always headed in this direction, or were there darker directions you contemplated? Do you gravitate more towards stories of hope and empowerment in general?

A fellow writer I admire immensely told me “I start a Sam J. Miller story, I know someone’s going to die.” Which I hadn’t thought about, but, I guess? And, yeah, it’s a story about processing grief, and specifically the grief caused by violence, so while I can certainly get down with a great revenge story, that didn’t feel right for this character. I gravitate towards stories of people fighting back against all the ways that the world is shitty, and since hope and empowerment are two crucial weapons in that fight, I do tend to revisit them often, but they’re not the only weapons. There’s also love, and rage, and sex, and substance abuse, and self-harm, and self-care, and revenge, and activism, and some are better than others. But one thing about the war that is life is we don’t always choose the best weapons to fight it with . . .

Dance and music are powerful touchstones throughout the narrative. When I read about a character who likes Fats Domino, I automatically wonder if this is just research or if the author has laced their own loves into the piece. Are these important to you?

I couldn’t really draw a line between my own obsessions and the things I research—I don’t include stuff in my fiction that I don’t find fascinating, or compelling, or horrifying in an illuminating way, and when I do research, it’s usually just an excuse to explore something I’m already hyped up on. The Fats Domino reference is there because I never miss a chance to remind folks that the history of American music is the history of white artists stealing from Black ones, or benefiting from structural barriers to Black music. Go on YouTube and listen to a single Pat Boone song—literally any song—and then a single Fats Domino song—any song—and tell me which one of them was a real artist making meaningful music.

For me, this piece is about a lot of wonderful things. What stands out about it most for you? What do you like most about it?

I am always happy when I can find new ways to talk about how the world is full of magic. And I like that there’s a subplot about finding healthy ways to be a sexual being when you’re a straight boy and everyone around has spent your whole life trying to make you into something brutal and cruel.

Is there anything else you’d like readers to know about “Conspicuous Plumage”?

Just that being published in Lightspeed has been one of the greatest honors of my short story career, and every month I’m blown away by what a magnificent space y’all have built for the cutting edge of contemporary science fiction, and what fantastic stories you find, and I’m so, so honored to have a piece in the 100th issue.

Blackfish City came out a few months ago, and before that, The Art of Starving. What can your fans look forward to next?

My third novel, Destroy All Monsters, will be released by HarperTeen in the summer of 2019! It’s young adult, like The Art of Starving, and it’s half gritty contemporary and half fantasy. It has dinosaurs and magic and it’s about all the ways we fight the evil in this world. Right now I’m on a short vacation from Novel Land, exploring Short Story City, which is a delightful place where I always enjoy myself. There’s a problematic analogy here I’m sure, about the difference between novels and short stories being the difference between a long, stable, satisfying romantic relationship and a hot, sweaty, mind-blowing session of anonymous sex, and how there’s room in life for both things.

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: Kat Howard

Wendy N. Wagner | 520 words

This story imagines ghosts in every season and every weather. It seems like different cultures have different times of year that they really associate with ghosts—for example, the Victorians told ghost stories at Christmas. Were you drawing on other cultural traditions when you wrote this piece?

I wasn’t consciously. I didn’t do direct research and I didn’t have a set plan for certain elements that I did or didn’t want to include. Of course, it’s possible that my subconscious writer brain, which is always collecting things that it finds beautiful or interesting or meaningful, may have remembered something and offered it up to me in terms of this story.

This story beautifully captures the essence of the different seasons. What are some of your favorite ways to celebrate the seasons?

Thank you! I don’t think of myself as celebrating seasons so much as trying to appreciate them. In terms of my favorite time to be, I love the late September into October stretch of fall, but I also love the first snow of the year, and the first green buds of spring, and the summer days that stretch on so late that it seems the twilight lasts forever.

Have you ever attended a séance or otherwise tried to communicate with the dead? Do you believe in ghosts?

I do. I haven’t tried to communicate with them directly since I was a teenager and had a very scary experience with a Ouija board, but I definitely believe that sometimes people linger or return and I believe in haunted places.

What are some of your favorite media (books, movies, games, whatever!) that address ghosts? What do you think it takes to make such a classic trope interesting? (Obviously your story does a great job!)

I love Joe Hill’s short story, “20th Century Ghosts.” Kelly Link’s “Two Houses” is so good—I heard her read from it and felt word drunk. I love stories that feel haunted, like Elizabeth Hand’s novella Wylding Hall. For me, ghost stories are interesting because ghosts are like us, but on a slant—different enough in terms of knowledge and experience to inspire awe or fright. I wonder why they stay, why they come back. They are like palimpsests, a current state layered over past experience, and that fascinates me.

What are some projects we can look forward to from you in the near future?

I have a short fiction collection, A Cathedral of Myth and Bone, that will be out from Saga Press in October. It contains some new work, including my Arthurian novella, “Once, Future” and also some previously collected stories. I’m really excited about that. Also in October, the first issue of my run on Books of Magic, which is part of Vertigo Comics’ Sandman Universe, begins. The art is by the amazing Tom Fowler, and I’m having a great time working on it.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Wendy N. Wagner is the author of more than forty short stories and has also written two novels for the Pathfinder role-playing game. Her third novel, An Oath of Dogs, is a sci-fi thriller from Angry Robot Books. She serves as the managing/associate editor of Lightspeed and Nightmare magazines. She is also the non-fiction editor of Women Destroy Science Fiction!, which was named one of NPR’s Best Books of 2014, and the guest editor of Queers Destroy Horror! She lives in Oregon with her very understanding family.

Coming Attractions

The Editors | 204 words

Coming up in October, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by Dale Bailey (“The Horror of Party Beach”) and Molly Tanzer (“The Real You™”), along with SF reprints by Adrienne Celt (“Big Boss Bitch”) and Jack Skillingstead (“Tribute”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Cameron Van Sant (“Super-Luminous Spiral”) and Melanie Kassel (“Ten Deals with the Indigo Snake”), and fantasy reprints by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (“Kaledioscope”) and Alex Irvine (“The Dream Curator”).

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

For our ebook readers, we also have our usual ebook-exclusive novella reprint and a book excerpt.

It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out.

• • • •

Looking ahead beyond next month, we’ve got a veritable plethora of stories forthcoming. We’ve got work from the following authors coming up over the next couple of issues: Theodora Goss, Theodore McCombs, A. Merc Rustad, and Ashok K. Banker.

So be sure to keep an eye out for all that speculative goodness in the months to come. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Lightspeed.

Thanks for reading!

Stay Connected

The Editors

Here are a few URLs you might want to check out or keep handy if you’d like to stay apprised of everything new and notable happening with Lightspeed:

Website

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Destroy Projects

www.destroysf.com

Newsletter

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/newsletter

RSS Feed

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/rss-2

Podcast Feed

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/itunes-rss

Twitter

www.twitter.com/LightspeedMag

Facebook

www.facebook.com/LightspeedMagazine

Subscribe

www.lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe

Subscriptions and Ebooks

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!).

Support Us on Patreon or Drip, or How to Become a Dragonrider or Space Wizard

The Editors

If you’re reading this, then there’s a good chance you’re a regular reader of Lightspeed and/or Nightmare. We already offer ebook subscriptions as a way of supporting the magazines, but we wanted to add an additional option to allow folks to support us, thus we’ve launched a Drip (d.rip/john-joseph-adams) and a Patreon (patreon.com/JohnJosephAdams).

TL;DR Version

If you enjoy Lightspeed and Nightmare and my anthologies, our Patreon and Drip pages are a way for you to help support those endeavors by chipping in a buck or more on a recurring basis. Your support will help us bring bigger and better (and more) projects into the world.

Why Patreon and Drip?

There are no big companies supporting or funding the magazines, so the magazines really rely on reader support. Though we offer the magazines online for free, we’re able to fund them by selling ebook subscriptions or website advertising.

While we have a dedicated ebook subscriber base, the vast majority of our readers consume the magazine online for free. If just 10% of our website readers pledged just $1 a month, the magazines would be doing fantastically well. So we thought it might be useful to have an option like Drip and Patreon for readers who maybe haven’t considered supporting the magazine, or who maybe haven’t because they don’t have any desire to receive the ebook editions—or who would be glad to pay $1 a month, but not $3 (the cost of a monthly subscriber issue of Lightspeed).

Though Lightspeed and Nightmare are separate entities, we decided to create a single “publisher” Drip and Patreon account because it seemed like it would be more efficient to manage just one page on each platform. Plus, since I sometimes independently publish works using indie-publishing tools (as described above), we thought it would be good to have a single place where folks could come to show their support for such projects.

Basically, we wanted to create a crowdfunding page where, if you enjoy my work as an editor, and you want to contribute a little something to help make it easier for us to produce more cool projects, then our Drip or Patreon are the place to do that.

What Do I Get Out of Being a Backer or Patron?

Well, you get the satisfaction of helping to usher the creation of cool new short fiction projects into the world! Plus, the more support we get, the better we can make the magazines and compensate our authors and staff. By becoming a supporter via Patreon or Drip, you help fund our growth and continued publication of two award-winning magazines. Of course, if you’re already one of our ebook subscribers (thank you!), you are already supporting us. This is for those who prefer to read the issues each month on our free websites, or wish to support our efforts more generally.

By becoming a supporter, you are also bestowed a title, such as Dragonrider, or Space Wizard, or Savior of the World and/or Universe, thus making you instantly the envy of all your friends.

Thank You!

If you’ve read this far, thanks so much. We hope you’ll consider becoming a backer on Patreon or Drip. Those URLs again are d.rip/john-joseph-adams and patreon.com/JohnJosephAdams.

Thanks in advance for your time. We look forward to hopefully being able to make the magazines—and my other publishing endeavors—even better with the support of people like you.

About the Lightspeed Team

The Editors

Publisher/Editor-in-Chief

John Joseph Adams

Managing/Associate Editor

Wendy N. Wagner

Associate Publisher/Director of Special Projects

Christie Yant

Assistant Publisher

Robert Barton Bland

Reprint Editor

Rich Horton

Podcast Producer

Stefan Rudnicki

Podcast Editor/Host

Jim Freund

Art Director

John Joseph Adams

Assistant Editor

Laurel Amberdine

Editorial Assistant

Jude Griffin

Reviewers

Arley Sorg

LaShawn Wanak

Chris Kluwe

Carrie Vaughn

Christopher East

Violet Allen

Copy Editor

Dana Watson

Proofreaders

Anthony R. Cardno

Devin Marcus

Webmaster

Jeremiah Tolbert of Clockpunk Studios

Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

The Editors

If you enjoy reading Lightspeed (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 and Fantasy 2015 (with Joe Hill)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016 (with Karen Joy Fowler)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017 (with Charles Yu)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018 (with N.K. Jemisin) [Oct. 2018]

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)

A People’s Future of the United States (with Victor LaValle) [Feb. 2019]

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

The Spaceship Next Door by Gene Doucette

In the Night Wood by Dale Bailey

Creatures of Want and Ruin by Molly Tanzer

Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones by Micah Dean Hicks

The Chaos Function by Jack Skillingstead

Upon a Burning Throne by Ashok K. Banker

Gather the Fortunes by Bryan L. Camp

The Unfinished Land by Greg Bear

The Chosen One by Veronica Roth

Visit johnjosephadams.com to learn more about all of the above.