TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 106, March 2019

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial: March 2019

SCIENCE FICTION

The Synapse Will Free Us from Ourselves
Violet Allen

On the Shores of Ligeia
Carolyn Ives Gilman

A Temporary Embarrassment in Spacetime
Charlie Jane Anders

My Children’s Home
Woody Dismukes

FANTASY

Self-Storage Starts with the Heart
Maria Romasco Moore

Ambitious Boys Like You
Richard Kadrey

A Hundred Thousand Arrows
Ashok K. Banker

Those Are Pearls
Kat Howard

NOVELLA

Of Love and Other Monsters
Vandana Singh

EXCERPTS

A Memory Called Empire
Arkady Martine

NONFICTION

Book Reviews: March 2019
Arley Sorg

Media Review: March 2019
Carrie Vaughn

Interview: Sarah Pinsker
Christian A. Coleman

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Maria Romasco Moore

Carolyn Ives Gilman

Ashok K. Banker

Woody Dismukes

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

© 2019 Lightspeed Magazine

Cover by Grandfailure / Fotolia

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Editorial: March 2019

John Joseph Adams | 296 words

Welcome to Lightspeed’s 106th issue!

Our first order of business this month is to congratulate our 2018 Nebula finalists, José Pablo Iriarte and Sarah Pinsker. Both José’s novelette, “The Substance of My Lives, the Accidents of Our Births” (lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/substance-lives-accidents-births) and Sarah’s short story, “The Court Magician” (lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-court-magician) were published in our January 2018 issue. We are so excited and happy for them both!

In our current issue, Carolyn Ives Gilman takes citizen science to the stars in her original science fiction short “On the Shores of Ligeia.” Our other SF short, “My Children’s Home,” by Woody Dismukes, paints a picture of a far future orphanage with disturbing social implications. We also have SF reprints by Violet Allen (“The Synapse Will Free Us From Ourselves”) and Charlie Jane Anders (“A Temporary Embarrassment in Spacetime”).

Maria Romasco Moore brings us our first original fantasy short—“Self Storage Starts with the Heart”—which gives us a plastic-wrapped solution to loneliness. Of course, Ashok K. Banker’s series continues with “A Hundred Thousand Arrows,” a short story hinging on a very thrilling chariot race. We also have fantasy reprints by Richard Kadrey (“Ambitious Boys Like You”) and Kat Howard (“Those Are Pearls”).

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 have an ebook-exclusive reprint of the SF novella “Of Love and Other Monsters,” by Vandana Singh, and an excerpt from Arkady Martine’s new novel A Memory Called Empire.

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

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Joseph Adams is the editor of John Joseph Adams Books, a science fiction and fantasy imprint from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is also the series editor of Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, as well as the bestselling editor of more than thirty anthologies, including Wastelands and The Living Dead. Recent books include Cosmic Powers, What the #@&% Is That?, Operation Arcana, Press Start to Play, Loosed Upon the World, and The Apocalypse Triptych. 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 an eight-time World Fantasy Award finalist. John is also the editor and publisher of the digital magazines Lightspeed and Nightmare, and is a producer for WIRED’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. He also served as a judge for the 2015 National Book Award. Find him online at johnjosephadams.com and @johnjosephadams.

The Synapse Will Free Us from Ourselves

Violet Allen | 6420 words

Editor’s Note: This story first appeared in A People’s Future of the United States, a new anthology edited by Victor LaValle and our own John Joseph Adams:

In these tumultuous times, in our deeply divided country, many people are angry, frightened, and hurting. Knowing that imagining a brighter tomorrow has always been an act of resistance, editors Victor LaValle and John Joseph Adams invited an extraordinarily talented group of writers to share stories that explore new forms of freedom, love, and justice. They asked for narratives that would challenge oppressive American myths, release us from the chokehold of our history, and give us new futures to believe in. The result is this extraordinary collection of twenty-five stories that blend the dark and the light, the dystopian and the utopian. These tales are vivid with struggle and hardship—whether it’s the othered and the oppressed, or dragonriders and covert commandos—but these characters don’t flee, they fight. A People’s Future of the United States is a call to arms for anyone who believes in our power to dream a just world. Thrilling, inspiring, and a sheer joy to read, this anthology reminds us of the life-giving power of storytelling.

Available Now from One World, an imprint of Penguin Random House.

I can create any scenario I want for Dante, any story, any setting—anything. I have total control over his universe. Today he inhabits a grand mansion. The design is mostly mid-century modern, with just a hint of gothic whimsy. Each room is crafted to maximize luxury and pleasure, pleasure that can exist beyond the laws governing the material universe. It is a miracle, a place of wonder and dreams, a place where anything may happen.

“Yo homie, I want the D!” Dante yells.

He and Dahlia are naked in the boudoir. I set up a very romantic scene for them. A river of fine champagne lazily flows around a bed seated upon a rose-petal island, all beneath sky lit by candles. These are all simple signifiers, but sometimes simplicity is the best. Dante entered from the Frasier zone, expecting his normal bedroom, only to find this delicious tapestry and Dahlia waiting for him, resplendent in elegant finery, lacy lingerie, and very sexual high heels. He was soon denuded, and so was she. Esquivel is playing, and Dahlia performs an erotic dance I choreographed based on Rita Hayworth’s Dance of the Seven Veils in 1953’s Salome. The rest writes itself. (Sex.)

Yet Dante only laughs scornfully, filled with pure amusement at his own irreverence. He shall get no D this day or any other, yet still his spiteful pleasure knows no end. “That D! You know what I’m talking ’bout!”

(D is a reference to a human man’s penis, which I presume he wants to have intercourse with or around.)

“Stop it,” I say into the microphone, louder than I intend. I look around. I don’t think anyone noticed. My workstation is in a cubicle on the main floor of the facility. I am surrounded by other Adjustment Engineers, each one working with his or her own client via the Synapse.

The Synapse is a miracle of modern engineering. The Synapse allows people to reach their full potential. The Synapse will free us from ourselves.

I give him a little buzz. Just a little so he knows I’m not playing games with him. He reacts absurdly, shaking, screaming, wriggling on the floor like a child. I know not to be fooled by these theatrics. We are doing this to help. I’m not a bad person, I promise. I want to help Dante. I love him (agape). I only want what’s best for him. I have never hurt him. All I have ever done is help him be the best version of himself that he can be. Or at least, I have tried.

“That sucked,” he says after he has recovered. “I mean, it was a powerful sensation, but I need some romance before the big climax, chief. What, is this your first time torturing anybody?”

“Stop it,” I say.

He smiles so big and so wide, like he knows he’s won whatever game he’s playing. “Maybe some spanking? Is that your thing? Some spanks, maybe some spit play? I feel like we could really have some fun together if you loosened up.”

Just a little buzz. Just one more. It doesn’t hurt as much as it seems. I’m not a bad person.

I can fix him. I can make him love her.

• • • •

“It’s been six months,” says Program Director Murphy.

“I know,” I say.

Program Director Murphy is a small, grandmotherly woman in her fifties. She is kind and good. She is my boss. I trained with her for a year before beginning this job. I know her well. This job has been my dream since I was a child. This is a good job. I am doing good work. I am a good person.

“What’s the problem?”

“He’s a difficult subject.”

“You’ve made no progress at all.”

“He’s a very difficult subject.”

“He’s your first, isn’t that right?”

Program Director Murphy’s office is large, blank, and circular. The corners where the walls meet the ceiling and floor are rounded, giving the impression of an infinite void, at the center of which is a desk for her and a chair for me. I am more afraid than I ought to be. She’s just my boss. My heart shouldn’t beat like this, and I shouldn’t feel like my head is swelling up like a balloon, like it’s growing to fill up all the empty space around me.

“Yes. My very first.”

A field of holotext floats in front of her face. The green light reflects on her skin, giving her the appearance of a small, grandmotherly woman in her fifties. She is kind and good. She is my boss. I know her well. I trained with her for a year before beginning this job.

“It says here that you spent a week making him watch Godard movies on repeat?”

“Yes,” I say. “They’re very romantic. Have you seen Pierrot le Fou? It literally tells you everything you need to know about heterosexual intercourse. I mean, it’s like a metaphor—the guy explodes at the end.”

“Do you know why we assigned you to this case, Daniel?”

“Not really, ma’am.”

“You and your subject share a love for twentieth-century ephemera, a sentimentality.”

“Of course.”

“But you’re too sentimental. Spare the rod, spoil the child. You need to be firmer. We’re doing this for his own good.”

This is a good job. I am doing good work. I am a good person.

“Yes.”

“Be firmer. They can take more than you think.”

“Okay, ma’am. Whatever you say.”

“There will be negative consequences if you can’t produce results.”

“Yes, ma’am. I understand. You can count on me.”

• • • •

I eat lunch in the cafeteria with my friend Xavier every day. He started here around the same time as me. I would enjoy fraternizing with him in the evenings as well, but we are assigned to different dormitories. But our lunch schedule lines up perfectly every day, so we can at least hang out then.

“I am starting to really fucking hate this fucking piece of shit,” he says.

Like me, he is having trouble with his subject.

“Today I made Hollie into a cheerleader and Javi into a quarterback, and then they were in the shower together. But then Javi just complained. I want go home; I want to read a book; I’m bored. He said he played fútbol in school, not football. It was so annoying.”

Xavier is small and . . . elegantly constructed. I haven’t measured his features, of course, but I strongly feel the golden ratio is in play. His hair is dark and shiny, and when I see him in the corner of my eye, it flows down gracefully to his shoulders, though in reality it is cut cleanly above the ear. He speaks with an aristocratic Spanish accent, and he stumbles when swearing, as if he cannot quite find the translation to encapsulate his anger. I feel as though I have known him for a long time, and I think that he is probably my best friend.

“They’re monsters,” I say. “If this were easy, we wouldn’t be here. It’s our job.”

Dora sits down at our table. She also started around the same time as us. She is a very beautiful woman. We are sort of friends, and sort of enemies. Also, I think she may be my girlfriend.

“You losers whining again?” she asks.

“We don’t whine,” I say.

“What do you call it, then?”

“A strategy session,” says Xavier.

She chuckles. “Nerds. You just have to bear down. Get into their minds. Suck them into the illusion. Daniel, did you end up doing that thing with the hundred cakes?”

“Five hundred, and I don’t want to talk about it.”

“I told you it wouldn’t work. Today, Ike proposed to Izzy and she said yes. It’s going great. You just gotta know how these people think. You have to manipulate them. Give them what they think they want. That’s how you get what you want.”

She continues to explicate her methods, which largely entail being great and naturally knowing how to do it. I appreciate her company, despite the name-calling. It is a little strange that she might be my girlfriend, but she is an amusing person. I enjoy it when she is around. This, I believe, is the essence of romance: enjoying it when a person of the opposite sex is around. This is why we live and fight. But she gets up quickly, and I realize that she had no intention of eating with us, rather that she is going from table to table in order to brag.

“I’ll see you losers later.”

“Bye,” says Xavier.

“I love you,” I say without thinking.

For a moment, she stares at me blankly, as if waiting for her thoughts to catch up with her, then she nods. “I love you, too.”

After she leaves, Xavier says, “Why don’t we actually have a strategy session? Really get into it? Later. After work.”

He speaks softly, purrs almost. Program Director Murphy is nearby, standing by herself on either side of the room, a small, grandmotherly woman in her fifties. She would not approve of socialization outside of the sanctioned areas. We could get in trouble. I should say no. All of my instincts are telling me to say no. Any other day, I would say no. But today, I don’t know. I have to get better at this, and I can trust Xavier. I feel as though I have known him for a long time, and I think that he is probably my best friend.

“Okay,” I say. “Let’s do it.”

“Just the two of us.”

• • • •

We are drawn to the aesthetics of heterosexualism, both in theory and praxis. There is a simple elegance to it, a mathematical harmony. The key fits into the lock, and in doing so the key is complete, the lock is complete, the door is open. Meaning is created by the dialectic of form and function, and meaning is the hammer with which we carve our lives from χάος and ἄπειρον, the formless infinite. Desire seeks only to replicate itself, but meaning seeks completion, and in completion we find ourselves.

Dante is lost, and he doesn’t even know it. That’s why he was sent here. Not because he was gay. There’s nothing wrong with being gay; everyone knows that. The Institute loves gay people. We’re their truest allies, their biggest fans. But the lifestyle is hard. Some people aren’t as tolerant as us. The indignities, the exclusion. It’s terrible. And then there are the health issues. The diseases, the physical strain of unnatural relations. These people were everywhere, all around us, suffering, practically screaming for help. Something had to be done. This is why the Institute was created. Dante is among the first subjects. I am going to give him a better life, a normal life.

This is a good job. I am doing good work. I am a good person.

I wipe out all of Dante’s memories of Dahlia and of the various trials he has undergone in the Synapse. We need a fresh start, a new coat of paint. He always figures out that he is in a simulated reality eventually, though he is unable to put together that he is, in fact, not the real Dante, just a digital copy scanned from the original’s mind. How could he, though? We all think of ourselves as “real,” even when everything around us seems false. The real Dante is asleep somewhere in the facility, probably in the basement or something. We’ll wake him up when Synapse Dante has learned his lesson. The digital will be merged with the analog, the ghost will re-enter the machine, and the whole will be healed. The real Dante will be good and free of trouble and strife.

All I have to do is get everything right. I’ve a great scenario in mind, a real adventure. Dahlia just needs a few tweaks. She’s a fairly basic AI—a puppet, really. I modeled her after Rita Hayworth. Rita Hayworth is the best woman. She was good at dancing, and she made Gilda. What more could a red-blooded American man ask for? Ginger Rogers? Boring. Myrna Loy? Too snobby. No, I know what cool guys like: Rita Hayworth.

Sometimes I think about Lena Horne or Josephine Baker, but then I don’t think of them. You know what I mean? When you think about something but you don’t think about it. There’s a word for that. It’s on the tip of my tongue. Do you ever feel like there’s something staring you right in the face but you can’t see it? No, that’s not it. No, it’s more like you know something’s there, but you don’t want to look. A monster under the bed or Bluebeard’s secret chamber. You can hear it, smell it, taste it, but everything is fine as long as you don’t look. But if you do look, you get eaten.

This is all prelude to the fact that today I make them act out the plot of Vertigo. Just the romantic part at the beginning, before it gets weird and horny, when it’s only a detective and a lady who’s maybe a ghost falling in love, and instead of the part where shit gets real at the bell tower, they get married.

This goes very poorly. Hurtful words are said that can never be taken back, no matter whose memories are erased.

• • • •

Xavier and I meet on the roof of Dormitory Epsilon. It wasn’t as hard as I thought dodging Program Director Murphy. She waits by all the exits at night, and also she patrols the halls. (We are allowed to leave. We are not prisoners. We just have to sign out first.) But the service hallway leading to the roof is near my room, close enough that I can slip in and out without being seen.

You can see the whole city up here, all light and color, impossible to make out any one particular building in the nether distance. I feel like I’m floating, like in a dream where you know if you look down you’ll fall, so I keep my head up and imagine I’m balancing on the edge of the sky.

“Give them something to want,” he says. “So you can take it away.”

There is a slight chill in the air, just enough that I can feel the heat of Xavier’s breath on my cheek as he whispers the secrets of pain.

“I think it’s all about signifiers. Images and connections. That’s how you get through to people.”

“But is it real?”

He smells like fresh sweat and cinnamon.

“Nothing’s real. That’s the secret of living. All we have is beauty and images and connections.”

“Have you ever kissed someone?”

“I can’t remember.”

“Me neither. It’s no big deal. Everybody forgets. But I wonder how we can teach people to love if we’ve never even kissed anyone.”

His chest goes up and down, up and down, swelling and shrinking, and it’s like his breath is the only air in the world.

“Maybe that’s our problem,” I say.

We kiss. Just as an experiment. He tastes like oysters and ozone, and I get lost a little in the moment. There are so many sensations at once, all of them good, and I try to focus on each one individually, but it’s like trying to count raindrops on your face, and I am unable to focus, and my mind clouds with touch and connection.

Kissing is very nice, I decide.

• • • •

My conversations with Xavier lead to the creation of a character I call Dante Jr. Dante Jr. is an irrepressible scamp between the ages of six and ten. I put some memories in Dante’s head of Dante Jr.’s birth, his first steps, his first day of school, et cetera. More clichés, I know, but they take a lot better than the memories of Dahlia. Those Dante Sr. rejects pretty quickly, thinks them through and says things don’t add up and freaks out and I have to reset him. But Dante Jr. is sticky, as long as there’s not too much Dahlia in the mix. I guess Dante was always meant to be a father. All the more reason to help him out, right? Dante only really remembers Dante Jr. when they are in the same room. Otherwise, he exists only on the periphery of his mind, so I can still focus on my primary goal of creating love. Dante Jr. is seasoning, some nice flavor for the dish I’m preparing. He comes in, does some little-kid stuff, then Dante does some dad stuff, and we all have a good time.

Honestly, I’m surprised by how well it works. Dante still figures out it’s a simulation every couple days if I’m not vigilant about erasing failed experiments, but he gets along so much better with Dahlia when Dante Jr. is in the room, and when he does figure it out, he assumes that Dante Jr. (and therefore Dahlia) is trapped in the simulation with him. They’re finally starting to bond. It’s beautiful. I think I’m finally getting good at this job.

Today they all made a cake together as a family. Just one. Not quite as many as I would like (five hundred), but it’s a start.

• • • •

Xavier and I have been meeting on the roof every night. We don’t talk about the kiss, but we talk about everything else. It’s really nice. It feels like listening to a new album from a band you already love, familiar and comforting but still new and exciting.

“I used to want to be a baseball player,” I say. “When I was a little kid.”

He smiles at me as though I were the first person to ever make another person smile, and I can’t help but return the expression. We sit next to each other on the edge of the roof. It’s nice.

“I can’t imagine you playing baseball,” he says.

“I was very bad, but I always thought I would become good someday. Like without any work or anything. Just one day I would be great at it, a star. Same with living life, really. I always thought I would just become normal one day.”

“I think you’re great as you are now.”

My hand brushes against his. It was not intentional, but not unpleasant. But he pulls his away as if bitten by a snake.

“Sorry,” I say.

“No, no, it’s not you.” He looks down and is quiet for a while before gathering his thoughts. “I had a meeting with Program Director Murphy today. She was not pleased with my progress.”

Program Director Murphy is a small, grandmotherly woman in her fifties. She is kind and good. She is my boss. I know her well. I trained with her for a year before beginning this job.

“And?”

“She put me in the machine. She grabbed me and held me down, and she was at the console. Just for a minute. I was still in her office, but I was in the machine, too. She said she was showing me how to teach. She . . . did something to my hand. It felt like it was on fire. Or something worse. I can’t really describe it. Just pain. She was whispering in my ear, said that I could do this to Javi, that I could do worse, and that Javi would learn his lesson then.”

The Synapse is a miracle of modern engineering. The Synapse allows people to reach their full potential. The Synapse will free us from ourselves.

“Are you okay?”

“Something is wrong, Daniel. Something is very wrong. The dots are starting to disconnect. The other day, I was trying to say something in Spanish, but I couldn’t. I know I used to speak Spanish, but I can’t anymore. I remember my parents speaking English, my childhood friends and relatives, everybody, but that can’t be. We lived in Morelia. My mom taught literature at the university. She used to read me poetry every night. She liked Paz and Zepeda. Mom. Mom. That doesn’t sound right. It’s not right. It’s not right.”

“It’s no big deal. Everybody forgets.”

“Just be careful. Don’t let her do anything to you. Do what you’re supposed to.”

I notice he has tears in his eyes, and I think he is starting to cry, but I don’t say anything, because I am polite.

• • • •

“I’m in lofe with you,” says Dahlia.

A simple typo, but Dante is enraged. He screams, cries, punches the ground, makes a production out of it. Just because I typed one word wrong. It’s a mistake on my part, I admit it, but I don’t think this response is warranted. I had a great thing going, and now I’ll have to start over.

He thought he was free. I crafted this scenario where I intentionally let him figure out it was a simulation, then made him think he could escape from it with Dahlia and Dante Jr. There were some puzzles to solve, some ducts to crawl through, vats of blue goo connected to supercomputers—it was a whole production. He and his family had just emerged from a mysterious underground facility to see their first “real” sunrise when Dahlia accidentally let slip the “lofe” thing. He put it together pretty quick after that.

“Chill,” I say. “I mean, please calm yourself.”

“You’re a monster!” he yells.

“This isn’t so bad. I think we learned a lot for next time.”

“Next time? Fuck you! I’m going to kill you when I get out of here.”

“You’re not real, dog. None of this is.”

“You’re never going to beat me. I’m never gonna do what you want. You fucking suck.”

And now I’m angry. Who’s this guy to talk shit to me? Who’s this guy at all? I’m trying to help him. I think back to Xavier, the fear in his voice as he described the fire in his hand. That’s not gonna happen to me, no. It can’t. I need to teach this guy a lesson.

Dante Jr. is standing next to his “father,” watching and waiting.

I delete him.

“He was pretend, too,” I say. “Everything is pretend but you and me.”

He doesn’t take it very well. He howls and cries. And he doesn’t have any little jokes for me for the first time ever.

I win.

Still, I’m a little sad. Dante Jr. was kinda like my son, too. Me and Xavier made him together. Me and Xavier. Wouldn’t it be funny if me and Javi could be dads? Wouldn’t it be so funny? Like a joke. Like a really good joke. Ha ha ha, I would laugh, after I told the joke to a friend. This is good, though, right? This is what I wanted. Now Dante knows he can’t have it both ways. He can’t have a family and be queer at the same time. This is what I was supposed to teach him. I thought I would like this more. It hurts to see him like this. But this job has been my dream since I was a child. This is a good job. I am doing good work. I am a good person.

There’s something I’m not seeing, and I don’t know what.

• • • •

I come across Dora on the way to lunch, sitting alone in a corner beneath the stairs. She doesn’t look like she normally does. She looks smaller somehow, and empty, like a mannequin wearing a Dora suit. She is clutching something in her hand that I can’t quite make out.

“Hey, are you okay?” I ask.

“No,” she says.

“What’s wrong?”

“Izzy. I had to reset her. It was all fucked up.”

“I thought everything was going good.”

“It was a grift. She was scamming me. Just pretending. Giving me what I wanted.” She laughs hard. “It was a good one.”

“Why’s it matter? We all have to delete stuff from time to time. It’s part of the job.”

“I don’t know. It felt like cutting off my own hand.”

We sit in silence for a moment, and I point at the object in her hand. “What’s that?”

She holds up a tiny holo projector. She turns it on, and it shows an image of her and another woman sitting next to one another. The woman has short hair and a kind smile. She looks familiar. Maybe I’ve seen her around the facility. But I can’t place her. Was she here before? We are allowed to leave. We are not prisoners. We just have to sign out first.

“I found this in my room.”

“Who’s that?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know anything.”

It’s no big deal. Everybody forgets.

“Are you okay?”

“I just thought I had it. I had everything. This job has been my dream since I was a child. This is a good job. I’m doing good work. I’m a good person. But I’m not good at this at all. I’m like you. A loser.”

I want to tell her that it’s not her fault, that our job is difficult, that we have to try our best to surmount the odds. But instead I say, “It’s like they’re setting us up to fail.”

And then I think about Dante, how much I hate him. I hate him for not doing what he’s supposed to do. I hate him for the way he talks to me. I hate him for being such a fucking queer.

Fuck.

Fuck.

Dante.

Dante.

“Daniel? What’s wrong?” she asks.

“I looked,” I say, and I stand. “And now I think I can see the monster under the bed.”

• • • •

He keeps remembering. I don’t know why. I refreshed him seven times. He’s fine for a little bit, then he starts to remember. I try to treat him right, give him as much television as he wants. But there is nothing in the world that can give him succor.

“Where is he?” he says, crying.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“Where am I?” he says.

“In a facility. To fix you. Make you normal.”

“What normal? What does that mean?”

“Normal people hate themselves.”

“Who are you?”

“I’m Daniel. And you’re Dante. Right?”

“I don’t know a Daniel.”

“Neither do I.”

• • • •

“I’m proud of you, Daniel. You’ve made real improvements in your work,” Program Director Murphy, a small, grandmotherly woman in her fifties, says. “You’re beginning to show some real promise.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”

“Your subject is beginning to learn.”

“Yes.”

“You know, I like you. I really do. I’m quite fond of the twentieth century myself. Just like you.”

She called me in. Said she wanted to congratulate me on my recent performance. I have never been more afraid in my entire life. She’s behind this, I know she is. She’s the one doing this to me, to us; I just have to be cool. It’s fine. I can leave. We are allowed to leave. We are not prisoners.

“That’s cool.”

“I still don’t care for your sentimental streak. You’re too wrapped up in the glitz and glamour. Hollywood hogwash. What I like is the people, the society.”

“Of course.”

“People used to know how to act. People knew what was right, and what was wrong, and if they did wrong, they at least had the decency to respect your religion, your morals, your basic sense of taste.”

“Cool.”

“It’s gotten worse and worse. You probably don’t even remember what it used to be like. Paradise. And now it’s chaos.”

“That does sound bad.”

“It is. That’s why we made this institute. That’s why we hired you. To figure out how to make things right. You’re doing so much for the cause, Daniel.”

“Cool. Cool cool cool.”

She stands up and walks over to me, places her hand on my shoulder and smiles warmly.

“I think he figured it out,” Program Director Murphy says.

“Are you sure?” asks Program Director Murphy, from her desk.

“He keeps saying cool. He’s not looking you in the eye. That’s what he does when he’s trying to not give it away. He’s so obvious,” she says from across the room.

Program Director Murphy groans. “Again? I thought you said we had it this time, Pam?”

Program Director Murphy shrugs.

My head hurts. I can see it, but I can’t see it. There’s more than one Program Director Murphy, but Program Director Murphy is a small, grandmotherly woman in her fifties. It doesn’t make sense. But I can see it. I try to stand up, but Program Director Murphy stops me, holds me down. There’s too many of her.

“What’s going on?” I ask.

Program Director Murphy slaps the back of my head. “Shut up.”

“Don’t do that,” says Program Director Murphy. “He can’t help it.”

Program Director Murphy walks over to me and kneels so that we are face-to-face. “I’m sorry, Daniel. Really. I really thought we had it this time.”

“What?”

“I guess you all just need to be pruned from time to time. Your friend Xavier starts asking questions and sneaking around. Isadora starts to freak out over her lost love. And you, Mr. Five Hundred Cakes, you figure it out. What a world we live in.”

“You want us to fail on purpose. You want us to hate ourselves. Why?”

“We’re trying to help you, Dante. We want people to accept you, like we do. We love people like you. People with your . . . proclivities.”

“Homos,” says Program Director Murphy as she types at the Synapse console.

Program Director Murphy rolls her eyes. “Thanks, Jeff. No. We understand. We just want you to be happy. We’re giving you a very important gift, Dante. You should treasure it. Sweet, simple shame. You used to suffer from a pitiful lack of shame before you came here. Sassy and smug and out and proud and so forth. Other people aren’t like me, Dante. They don’t appreciate it. They don’t like it being rubbed in their face. They don’t like being forced to accept you. Don’t worry. You’ll still be yourself after this. Most of our graduates are. We’ve never been able to really fix you all. But at least you’ll know how to keep it to yourself. Maybe you’ll settle down, find a nice girl, have some kids, satisfy your urges in secret. Or at the very least, you can be the bachelor uncle or the lonely oddball neighbor. Like in one of your movies. All you need is beautiful, wonderful shame. We love you, Dante. I promise.”

“Is this . . . is this real?”

Program Director Murphy all laugh.

“Don’t worry, Dante. You’re the original. Meat is as easy to work with as ones and zeroes. It’s all the same technique, really.”

“Let me go!” I scream. “We are allowed to leave. We’re not prisoners. We just have to sign out first.”

Program Director Murphy stands up and nods. “Okay. I think we only need a few tweaks. He definitely needs to socialize more. All he does is sit alone and think, think, think. We need to make him more compatible with Dora.”

“I think he needs more bro time. Like him and Xavier. They could be friends.”

“Xavier always asks him to go sneaking around at night. He always says no, and I want to keep it that way. They’re close enough as it is. Work friends, that’s all. You know their . . . history.”

“Please don’t do this,” I say.

“Don’t worry, Dante,” Program Director Murphy says. “Just remember your triggers, and you’ll be okay. Everybody forgets. It’s no big deal.”

• • • •

Today, Dante and Dahlia have to prepare and eat five hundred cakes. It’s a bonding exercise for the two of them. The cakes are white on the outside and pink on the inside (a sexual metaphor) and, when prepared according to the instructions, are delicious, perfect, pure, and without flaw or deviance: absolute cake. Dante ought to love the cake as much as the cake loves him. He ought to be happy and eat his delicious cakes with a smile on his face and a song in his heart. Cake is an elaboration of bread, and bread is life and love and beauty. We may recall Neruda’s poetic image of the leavened dough rounding and rising, mirroring the swelling of a mother’s womb. Or we may recall the mysticism of Dali’s breadbaskets, the numinous hunger evoked by the loaf still warm from the hearth. We desire to expand, to procreate, to be large, and to contain multitudes. This is normal.

• • • •

I eat lunch in the cafeteria with my friend Xavier most days. He started here around the same time as me. I would enjoy fraternizing with him in the evenings as well, but we are assigned to different dormitories. But our lunch schedule lines up perfectly every day, so we can at least hang out then.

“Where have you been?” he asks.

“What do you mean?” I ask.

He turns his head from side to side and comes close, whispering, “Our, um, strategy sessions. You haven’t come. Is something wrong?”

“I would enjoy fraternizing with you in the evenings as well, but we are assigned to different dormitories.”

“Okay. What?”

Dora sits down at our table. She also started around the same time as us. She is a very beautiful woman. We are sort of friends, and sort of enemies. Also, I think she may be my girlfriend.

“Hey, losers,” she says.

“Dora. Have you noticed anything strange about Daniel lately?”

“The other day he told me he saw the monster under the bed, and then he just walked away without saying goodbye or ending the conversation. It was weird.”

“I don’t remember that,” I say.

“It happened,” says Dora. “I remember because I was having a significant emotional moment.”

“It’s no big deal. Everybody forgets,” I say.

“He’s got a point,” says Dora.

“Yes. Everybody forgets,” he says. He looks sad. I don’t know why. He should get a girlfriend like me. That will solve his problems.

“So anyway,” Dora says, “I think I figured out a way to get Izzy to finally do what I want without being weird. It’s sort of a meta thing where I—”

Javi slams his fist on the table. “No. No. I don’t want to forget. I want to remember. I will remember.”

“Remember what?” I ask.

He starts pronouncing t. Over and over. Tapping his tongue on the top of his palate. Again and again. T— t— t— t—. He goes on like that for minutes. Tears start to well up in his eyes. Tears. Is that it? T— t— tears. No. He looks like he’s having a nervous breakdown.

“Te. Te. Te amo. Daniel, te amo.”

I stare at him as he crawls across the table, knocking his food to the ground. Before I can do anything, he kisses me. He tastes like oysters and ozone, and I get lost a little in the moment. I feel something inside me, something strong, and I can feel something breaking.

“Thank you,” I say, and I kiss him.

It’s like going home after a long time away. You see all the familiar landmarks and signposts, and you have enough distance that you really see them, and you don’t just ignore them, and you just connect with yourself, all the past versions of you, all at once, seeing and remembering and feeling.

A scream shatters the moment. Program Director Murphy is on the ground next to us. Next to her is Program Director Murphy. Izzy is standing above them with an empty trash can above her head.

“There’s two of them?” she says. “That doesn’t make sense.”

There is gasping and yelling from the other engineers in the cafeteria. Panic begins to set in. I stand on the table and try to explain. I don’t know how much I remember and how much I don’t remember, but I do my best.

“They tried to make us into monsters, but we’re not. They wanted us to hurt ourselves, but we don’t have to. We have love. And also, just, like, fucking.”

Xavier—no, Javi—laughs and grips my hand. I notice other hands being held, shoulders rubbed, arms lovingly wrapped, wet eyes, hopeful smiles. We weren’t the only ones. We were never the only ones. I just couldn’t see it.

The Program Director Murphy serving lunch has disappeared, and a group of Program Director Murphys are at the door, preparing to storm in.

“We have to fight,” I say. “We can win. I know it. They don’t care about anything but themselves, but for us, this is everything. We are not prisoners. My name is Dante. Remember.”

The engineers stand. We arm ourselves with whatever we can. Garbage, trays, cutlery, whatever can hurt. And I try to think of a good movie where something like this happens, and I can’t, because this is real.

“Fucking riot!” screams Izzy. She throws the trash can into a window, and the shattered glass catches the light and sparkles for a second like the sunrise.

And so we riot.

©2019 by Violet Allen. Originally published in A People’s Future of the United States, edited by Victor LaValle and John Joseph Adams. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Violet Allen is a writer based in Chicago, Illinois. Her work has appeared in Lightspeed, Liminal Stories, Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, Resist: Tales from a Future Worth Fighting Against, A People’s Future of the United States, and elsewhere. She is currently working very hard every day on her debut novel and definitely has more than ten pages written, is not lying to her agent about having more than ten pages written and does not spend most of her time listening to podcasts, and everything is totally cool, I promise. She can be reached on Twitter at @blipstress.

On the Shores of Ligeia

Carolyn Ives Gilman | 7220 words

Seth Calder felt like he had barely dozed off when his alarm blared at 6:00 a.m. Level morning sunlight leaked through the blinds onto the birch and linen furniture of his Stockholm apartment. Amalia was already in the shower, so he lurched out of bed and went to check his news feed.

NASA TO LAUNCH MARS CREW TODAY, said the first headline. The picture showed the ten crew members in flight suits, grinning at the camera. They were the best of the best—fit, photogenic, heroic, multiracial. Seth wouldn’t have passed the first step of screening for the mission. A short, nearsighted astrobiologist with a bit too much weight wasn’t the kind of person the U.S. sent to space. Not that he begrudged them their glory—he wished them well. He had just leapfrogged over them. He hoped to be working on Titan today.

The shower stopped, and he went to go rouse Tidbit. She looked angelic asleep, a blonde wisp of a child. Seth had never imagined himself with children, and was constantly taken aback by his infatuation with this little being who had fallen into his life along with Amalia. “Time to get up, Peapod,” he said, shaking her gently.

Her eyes scrunched tighter. “That’s not my name,” she mumbled.

“Isn’t it?” he said with exaggerated amazement. “Let’s see, what could your name be? Is it Nanomite? Is it Bedbug?”

She giggled. “It’s Dannika. You’re the only one who calls me Tidbit.”

The bathroom door opened and Amalia looked in, wrapped in a towel. “Time to get up.”

The girl immediately sat up in bed. You could tell who the authority was in this house, Seth thought. So much for his parenting skills.

Amalia and Tidbit talked in Swedish over the breakfast table. Seth could pick up most of it, but he hated to speak it and expose his clumsiness. At last he looked at his watch and said, “I’ve got to get going.”

“Yeah, you’ve got to herd the Wildwoman to Titan,” Amalia said with a smile. Wildwoman was her name for Seth’s boss.

“Why can’t I go to Titan?” Tidbit said.

Seth smiled at her. “You know where that is?”

“It’s the biggest moon of Saturn,” she answered promptly. At seven, she already knew her planets and could tell you about red dwarfs and neutron stars. It came from living with an astrobiologist and a physicist.

Seth always walked Tidbit to school, since it was on his way to the Tunnelbana. It had seemed awkward in the days when Tidbit hadn’t yet decided whether he was an evil stepfather or not; now she chattered happily as they walked, but it still seemed awkward because it was such a dadlike thing to do. Is this really me? he kept thinking.

The streets were quiet and clean in the pastel light of morning. In fact, Stockholm always seemed to Seth like an artificial simulation of a city where everything actually worked. It lacked those touches a real city had—the dirt was missing, and the scary parts of town, and the homeless people begging at the train stations. He was used to Boston.

After dropping off Tidbit at school, he headed for the Tunnelbana to catch his train. On the long ride out to Kista he was so keyed up he had to force himself to concentrate on the news. The media outlets weren’t covering his team’s work with anything like the fervor they gave to the NASA launch. The Americans—odd, how he thought of his own country in the third person—had the edge on showmanship. Big, virile rockets blasting off were way more cinematic than the cutting-edge science the European Space Agency was doing. Ever since the change of administrations, the Americans had thrown all their money into a boots-on-the-ground approach to space exploration. It wasn’t surprising; the American space program had been founded by World War II veterans intent on conquering space the same way they had conquered the Pacific, in giant steel ships. Or maybe their thinking went even further back, to the age of Hudson and Pizarro, when men in ships planted flags on foreign shores in order to claim them.

Odd, for people who thought of themselves as progressive, how anchored in the past American paradigms were. But he didn’t resent them, he reminded himself. He wished them well.

No ships were involved in the ESA program where Seth worked. It wasn’t about square-jawed heroism. They didn’t want to put human bodies into space; they wanted to put human minds there.

Kista was a walkable, suburban campus of gleaming buildings housing high-tech research companies, interspersed with little parks decorated with tame trees. The brick building where Seth worked had a big satellite dish on the roof, but that wasn’t how they communicated with Saturn. A worldwide string of radio telescopes picked up the signals twenty-four hours a day, and relayed the data to the participating institutions.

Seth headed up to the auditorium, expecting to find his boss, Dr. Katrina Beshni, holding forth to anyone gathered there. Today would be her moment in the limelight, and she relished it. It was two hours before the exploration of Titan was scheduled to start, but the auditorium was already filling with members of the astrobiology team, drinking potent Swedish coffee and talking about the climate data collected so far. The big screen was showing a “live” feed from the lander on Titan. The time delay due to the distance was almost eighty minutes, but that was as close to live as humans had ever achieved. The scene was a rocky plain shrouded in orange fog. It was shown in visible light, though enhanced to make it look brighter than it was. If Seth had been there in person, it would have looked dimmer than a gloomy, overcast twilight on Earth. Not to mention that, if he actually had been there, he would have been instantly frozen into a block of ice in the -180oC cold.

All over the world, he knew, scientists were gathered in offices and auditoriums, watching the same feed. At the moment, the robot wasn’t doing anything but running some diagnostics; the scene wouldn’t get interesting until Dr. Beshni’s program took over. In the meantime, some of the scientists clustered by a television showing preparations for the NASA launch.

He scanned the room for his mentor. Dr. Andreas Helberg, an intimidatingly eminent biochemist, was coming toward him.

“Have you seen Dr. Beshni?” Seth asked.

“You are the one who normally keeps track of her,” Dr. Helberg said with a hint of reproach.

Seth checked his phone, but there was no message from her. “I’ll check her office,” he said.

She wasn’t there, so after a stop in his own office to leave his coat and pick up a flash drive of files, he headed down to the virtual reality lab in the basement. Kjeld was at work there, in a studio so packed with equipment it nearly hid him—which was hard to do, since he was a big, brown-bearded Viking of a man.

“Is Dr. Beshni here yet?” Seth asked.

Kjeld shook his craggy head and glanced at the clock. “Call and tell her to get down here, would you? Dublin’s going to hand over to us in ninety minutes.”

“She’ll show up,” Seth said. His mentor had been working toward this day for fifteen years; he knew she was not about to miss it.

Institutions all over Europe were sharing the lander they had sent to Titan. Since its touchdown last month, technicians in Dublin had been deploying, testing, and calibrating the robot explorer; Dr. Beshni would be the first to use it for actual science, and Seth would be monitoring. The robot’s schedule had been set up for a long time; Beshni would have only three hours before handing off to a climate researcher in Hamburg.

Seth went into the adjoining room where the VR setup was, along with the computer station where he would be riding shotgun. When he woke it, it showed the same scene as in the auditorium upstairs.

His phone gave off the mating call of a bearded seal, and he looked at the text that had come in. It was from Dr. Beshni and said only, EMERGENCEY—call.

Instantly, he called her. It rang, then went to voice mail, so he called again. This time she answered. There was a lot of background noise. “Where are you?” Seth said.

“Emergency Room, hospital,” she said. “I am walk into a hole in the street. My leg, I broke it. They are putting pins in it. I tell them, I have no time for this today. They say yes, now.”

Seth could just imagine. She had probably been looking at her phone, but she was perfectly capable of falling in holes anyway, she was that absentminded. It was a good thing she would never have to go to Titan in reality.

Someone was telling her in Swedish to put down the phone. “How long?” Seth asked.

“Three days, they dream. You must take over.”

“Me?” Seth said, feeling paralyzed.

“Who else? Stupid surgeons!” The phone went dead.

Seth stood for a moment, panic-stricken. She was the genius; he was just the lowly postdoc who shadowed her, cleaning up the chaos. She had been going to narrate her remote-control tour of Titan for the worldwide audience in her trademark fractured, headlong English.

Shaking a little, Seth went back to Kjeld’s den. “She’s not coming,” he said. “She broke her leg.”

Kjeld stared a moment, then said, “Well, isn’t that just like her. Better suit up.”

“But—ˮ

“You know this robot and this VR setup better than anyone. Do you want to waste our time?”

That was not an option. They had been waiting for years.

Seth went into the toilet to calm his nerves. He could do this. The artificial intelligence program that would drive the robot was as much his work as Dr. Beshni’s—more so, in fact, because she hadn’t had the patience for the boring bits. But knowing that several hundred of the most important people in the discipline would be watching—that was the part she thrived on, and he didn’t.

Alyssa Chiu was waiting to assist him in the VR lab when he returned. Word had traveled fast. “Wouldn’t you know she’d do something dramatic today,” Alyssa said. “As if the pinnacle of her career weren’t enough.”

“She was probably distracted,” Seth said.

Their VR equipment was state of the art—a full-body suit and helmet, with a circular 360-degree track with railing. He pulled on the suit and gloves, then stood growing hot as he waited for a signal from Kjeld through his earpiece. Alyssa sat where he should have been, in front of the computer screen. The rest of the biology team was following on the screen upstairs.

“Fifteen minutes,” Kjeld said.

“Why don’t you explain to the audience?” Alyssa said. She was handling the outgoing signal. “Put on the helmet and I’ll put you through.”

The helmet was showing an environment of Swedish woods so as not to be claustrophobic. It was a little distracting. “You’re on,” Alyssa said.

Seth cleared his throat. “Um, hello everyone. This is Seth Calder, Dr. Beshni’s assistant. I have bad news. She broke her leg this morning.” He could imagine the consternation and eyerolls spreading. “She’ll be all right, at least she was when I talked to her. But she won’t be able to join us today. Sorry, you’re going to have to put up with me.”

“Ten minutes,” Kjeld said.

“We’ll be starting in a few minutes. We’ll have to spend some time calibrating the suit, but the program will start right after that. I’m not controlling the robot, obviously; but I’ll be able to sense its environment in more detail, and I’ll try to tell you about it.”

Because of the time delay, it wasn’t possible to control the robot in real time, so their team had created an artificial intelligence program designed to react like a biologist. It had been transmitted to Titan and pre-loaded in the robot’s brain a week ago. Up until then, Seth and Dr. Beshni had been putting the final touches on it by running the robot’s identical twin across the terrain of the Swedish arctic. The AI didn’t actually know any biology—all it was trained to do was to recognize things a biologist would find interesting. Seth had spent many tedious days teaching the neural network to look in promising places and react appropriately to what it saw. Now, if it didn’t perform, everyone would know who to blame.

“Switching over,” Kjeld said.

And then Seth was on Titan.

“Oh my God!” he exclaimed.

The resolution was much sharper than he had expected—no comparison to the fuzzy video feed the others were following. He could see details in the surrounding rocks, shadows and flow marks in the sand. The robot’s camera-laden “head” had a nearly 360-degree view, but Seth had to turn to see behind him. There stood the lander that had carried him—rather, his robot body—to the surface. It was now acting as charging station, lab, and communications relay to the orbiter. The heavy orange clouds were bright behind it, so he knew that direction was south. He could only see ten or twenty feet around him.

“Initiating haptic interface,” Kjeld said on his earpiece.

Tactile data flooded over him. A chilly, humid breeze touched his face, and he wrinkled his nose at the chemical scent. The smell represented the atmospheric chemistry without duplicating it, since the actual atmosphere of Titan would have been odorless but unbreathable. What he was experiencing was what an organism evolved to live on Titan would have felt. In a way, the robot was such an organism—designed for conditions humans were not.

“Adding in radar and infrared,” Kjeld said.

The view suddenly cleared. The fog dissipated and he saw the landscape around him. He was standing on a sandy, rock-strewn plain at the base of some rugged hills. The ground sloped downward to his right, into a gully where a stream flowed. Seth turned to trace the stream to its source in the snow-capped mountains to the south. The scene looked so much like an afternoon in the South Dakota badlands, it was hard to remember it wasn’t a stream of water. Liquid methane took the place of water here, and water ice formed the rocks.

A slight rise hid the view to the north, and he wanted to see over it. The robot, pre-trained to replicate his curiosity, began to move in that direction. It was actually a four-legged vehicle, designed for clambering over rugged terrain, but Seth couldn’t see the back legs, and so the illusion of walking was convincing. When he came to the top of the rise, he let out a breath. “I’ll be damned.” Before him lay the indented coastline of a sea stretching to the horizon. Ligeia Mare. Streaks of wind rippled the calm surface. The nearby stream curved off and flowed eastward into a valley.

“Quit talking to yourself and tell us what you see,” Alyssa’s irritated voice said in his ear. He had forgotten that everyone was listening.

“Um, it’s probably nothing you can’t see for yourselves,” Seth said. “But for me, it’s so real. I’m actually there.” He sounded like a blithering fanboy, he knew; he couldn’t help it. The experience was breathtaking.

If he had been there, he probably would have walked on, awestruck, toward the seashore. But the robot made a more logical decision, to investigate the gully. “Whoops, I guess we’re going to look at the methane stream,” he said in his role as conductor of this tour.

The opposite side of the stream gully was eroded and showed clear stratigraphy. “The geologists are going to want to take a look at that,” he commented. Perhaps he would as well, if his search for life turned into a search for fossils of life. At the moment, he and his robot were much more interested in the soft hydrocarbon “sand” the color of sweet potatoes, especially in the puddle formed by an eddy. The robot focused in on some foam at the edge of the puddle. “Oh, boy, pond scum!” Seth exclaimed.

A magnifying camera telescoped from the robot’s body, and its field of view appeared in an inset, as if he were looking through a magnifying glass. It showed nothing wriggling or swimming, but there were some translucent bubbles. Seth’s breath caught with excitement. “We need to test those,” he said. “If they are vinyl cyanide or polyimine membranes, and not just nitrogen bubbles, we might have hit the jackpot.” If he had trained the robot right, it would take a sample. And sure enough, it reached out its sampling arm and siphoned the scum into a tube to be taken back to the lander for more analysis.

There was, of course, no chance that Earthlike life would exist on Titan. What they were searching for was far more exciting: life that had evolved using completely different chemistry. Seth was hoping for hydrogen-based life forms that metabolized acetylene instead of glucose. If they found it, it would mean that life was universal and could evolve anywhere.

But what hydrogen-based life would look like was completely unknown, and recognizing it might be a challenge. Seth scanned upstream and downstream for something else interesting, but saw nothing. The robot, however, took off down the gully, and soon Seth figured out what it had seen. “That rock shows differential shading on one side,” he explained. “On Earth, that might be desert varnish, or even evidence of lichen.” Under magnification, it looked like nothing more than a whitish crust from evaporation, but the robot dutifully took another sample. The mass spectrometer back at the lander would at least tell them the chemical composition.

“This is going really well,” Seth enthused as the robot climbed the sloping bank again. “It’s noticing all the right stuff and taking the right actions. I couldn’t—ˮ A drop of rain hit him on the head, or seemed to. “Hot damn, it’s raining!” He looked up, and there was a dark cloud overhead. A few drops pattered around him on the ground. The climatologists would be envious at missing this.

“Seth, remember your audio is live.” Alyssa sounded amused.

As the robot headed off toward the seashore, Seth said soberly, “You can see all sorts of evidence of the methane cycle. Rainfall, erosion, evaporation, probably springs of ground ethane—all exactly like on Earth, just different chemistry.”

The land grew more rugged as he neared the shore. At last the scene opened before him—a rocky, indented coastline with eroded cliffs plunging into the sea, like something from Big Sur, except there was no surf; the sea was strangely still. The wind would have ruffled his hair if it had been real. Below, he could see tidal pools in the rocks, rimmed with a crust of yellowish deposits, possibly benzene. The entire landscape before him would be combustible on Earth; but here, without oxygen, it was stable. In fact, here oxygen was the rare and flammable liquid.

He wanted to climb down to get closer to the shore, but the robot was programmed to know its limits, and rock climbing was not one of its skills. Instead, it activated a telescopic lens and focused in on the pool edges.

“What the . . .” Seth could not figure out what he was looking at. The pools were fringed with a ruff of stiff, lacelike crystals. They formed small pyramidal shapes like a grove of miniature Christmas trees. “Crystals?” he wondered aloud. “I’ve never seen crystals like this. We need to get a sample.”

As he scanned the landscape for a safe way down to the shore, the rain began in earnest. A gust of wind buffeted him, driving the rain across the clear dome of his eye-cameras. The robot ignored the weather and headed toward a promontory with a better view of the seashore. Seth was scanning for a slope that might lead safely downward when his view tilted, throwing off his balance. He looked down, and saw the ground under his large pad-feet sinking, giving way. “Oh, no!” he shouted. The robot tried to step back, but an entire section of the cliff was caving in. Everything turned sideways. All his senses told him he was tumbling downward, rolling, falling, bumping, then skidding down a steep slope, and finally coming to a stop with the rain pattering around him.

He had wrecked the robot. Billions of dollars, decades of work, thousands of scientists watching, and he had literally fallen off a cliff. “Oh God,” he said miserably, “what did I do?”

Of course, he had done nothing. It had all happened over an hour ago. But it had been his program running the robot, his curiosity that had led it to the edge.

He lay pitched sideways on a slope of rubble. He was considerably closer to the seashore now, and could see from his canted perspective that the cliffs behind him were, in fact, riddled with caves, eroded underneath like the frozen curls of breaking waves. It was no wonder the ground had given way.

“Well,” Alyssa said in his ear, “that’s one way to get down to the shore.”

“Shut up,” he answered. “You can’t make me feel worse than I do already.”

As he lay there, wondering what to do now, he heard the most unexpected sound imaginable—the whine of a mosquito. His first thought was that something had gone wrong with the robot’s hearing. The sound faded, then came back, varying in pitch. “There must be a loose wire . . .” he started to say. Then something flitted across his view.

“What the hell?” he exclaimed.

He wanted desperately to deploy the net that was one of his sampling mechanisms, to catch whatever it was for a closer look. But the sampling arm was pinned underneath him. There was whir of machinery, a thwack of ice-pebbles against his carapace, and his viewpoint shifted. The gravel underneath him gave way, he slid downward, teetered, and with a jolt came to rest on the ground, miraculously upright. Orange dirt pattered down the slope behind him.

He realized that the robot, reacting to its curiosity programming, had tried to extend the sampling arm, and that was all it had taken to disturb the slope and set him upright again.

The robot stood still, running diagnostics, for several minutes. Seth spent the time scanning the slope, the air, everything, for what had made the insect sound. At last the robot took a step forward, and relief washed over Seth. Could he be so lucky that it had not been damaged?

The maddening buzzing came back. Seconds later, he saw something swooping toward him from the sea—a small gray body the size of a seagull, with three propellers atop. It had noticed him, and came close, hovering, so close he could see the camera lens and the lettering on its side.

“A drone?” Seth said, bewildered.

It rose straight up, and was joined by another one, then two more, till there was a swarm of half a dozen drones, all swooping down one by one to look at him as if he were a circus attraction.

“Alyssa,” he said, “are these our drones?”

“Uh, no,” she said.

They had considered sending drones, once. They were perfect for large-scale surveying, and in the thick Titan atmosphere, flying was easier than on Earth. But the ESA’s top priority was looking for life—and for that, you had to get down on your knees in the mud.

“Then who sent them? The writing on them is Chinese.”

“Yes, we noticed that. We’re checking it out.”

The flock of drones swooped low, then scattered—some heading east along the coastline, some west, some straight out to sea. He watched them disappear into the distance. Nothing he had seen on Titan had surprised him so much. It was inconceivable that someone could have a secret space program that had beaten the EU here. But either he was hallucinating, or there they were.

“They’re lucky I didn’t try to catch them in a sample net,” Seth muttered.

The rain had passed on, and the fog had cleared. The sea was burnished copper under a tangerine sky. He stood for a moment, listening to the wind and the solitude. It was beautiful here, he realized. Strange, but beautiful. He hoped it would never get crowded.

The robot lurched forward, resuming its biology program, untroubled by the appearance of little flying machines where none should be.

“Seth, you’ve still got a problem,” Alyssa broke in. “You need to get back to the lander somehow.”

It was true; his batteries would run down in fifteen hours or so, and he would need to recharge. The robot was just a sample-collector, and all the real equipment was back at the landing site. Looking up at the sheer cliffs, he now faced the same dilemma he had before, but in reverse; somehow, he had to get up them.

“Alyssa, can you tell where I am on the map?” He was hoping it might steer him to a reasonable route.

“Sorry, it’s not detailed enough to help,” she said. Titan’s thick atmospheric clouds made visual mapping from orbit impossible, so radar was all they had. She added, “We know you’re 1.2 kilometers north-northwest of the lander.”

He was surprised he had come so far. “How much time do I have?” he asked. “Are my three hours nearly up?”

After a pause, Alyssa’s voice said, “You exceeded your three hours twenty minutes ago. Hamburg ceded their time to you, because you were having so many . . . adventures.”

They didn’t want to have to clean up the mess he had made. The very public mess. He nearly groaned. “Never mind, I’ll figure it out,” he said to buck himself up.

There was a pause. “Sorry,” she said. “I just got word they’ve decided to shut you down.”

“No!” he protested.

“The decision was made above our heads. They are going to deactivate the robot to conserve the batteries until they come up with a plan to get it back to the lander. They’re sending the instructions now.”

“Then I still have eighty minutes.”

“Go for it,” she said. “Just don’t fall in the lake, okay?”

Meanwhile, the robot was unaware of the consternation back home. It took off to investigate a glassy puddle in the icerock. There was a slight breeze blowing, but the pool seemed unnaturally still, as the sea did on a larger scale. When he got closer, Seth could see that either the liquid had a particularly high surface tension or there was a clear film over the surface, like a thin plastic wrap. “On Earth, that would be a biofilm, a bacterial colony,” Seth said aloud, hoping someone was still listening to his discoveries. “Here, it might be acrylonitrile. If so, it’s still important. We think acrylonitrile might play the same role here as phospholipids on Earth.” The robot reached out its sampling arm, but as soon as it touched the pool the film broke and disappeared. The robot took a liquid sample anyway.

Seth scanned the landscape impatiently for the white crystals he had seen from the cliff, but could not locate them. The robot’s attention was on the seashore, and it made its way steadily over the icerocks toward where the waves lapped. Seth could hear them hissing against the pebbles. A flat ledge protruded out into the methane sea, and the robot proceeded out onto it, going so close to the edge that Seth nearly shouted at it to stop. It did.

From this vantage point, Seth could peer down into the sea. The liquid methane was crystal clear, and the ledge plunged down several feet—or was it several meters?—to a rocky bottom. As the robot extended its arm to take another liquid sample, Seth saw something un-rocklike in the depths. At first, the robot didn’t seem to notice. Then it extended its magnifying arm until it submerged under the surface, and the view became clearer. There was a cluster of something that looked like brownish pinecones on the seafloor.

Seth nearly whooped in exhilaration. Instead, he put on his best professional voice. “That looks distinctly organic. That is, not necessarily carbon-based, but complex. I suppose it could be some sort of odd erosion pattern, or a concretion, but we need to get a sample to be sure.”

The robot snaked out its sampling arm, but the objects were too far down. “Damn it!” Seth couldn’t help but say.

“Seth,” Alyssa interrupted, “your time’s up.”

“No! I’m just getting somewhere.”

It was intensely frustrating. He felt sure that he was seeing evidence of life all around, but each time he thought he had some proof, it was too far away, or it dissolved into ambiguity. He gazed around at the landscape, trying to absorb every detail, to write it on his memory. Then the robot lurched around, heading away from the shore. Midway between the cliffs and the sea it stopped. Seth’s world went blank.

When he took the VR helmet off, he found he was soaked in sweat, although he had felt chill up to now. The suit was clammy. “That was amazing!” he said to Alyssa.

“Yeah, it really went well, except for the part where you nearly wrecked the robot and marooned it without a power source,” she said.

“I meant that we learned a lot more than I expected on the first time out.”

“Right. We’re convening in the conference room upstairs for a postmortem. Why don’t you get dressed and join us?”

Postmortem sounded a little premature. But he grabbed his clothes and headed for the washroom for a quick shower.

When he entered the conference room, the scientist who had been talking fell silent and everyone around the table turned to look at him as he tried to slip inconspicuously into a seat. No one clapped or said “congratulations.” The accusatory silence stretched on until someone cleared his throat and said, “Well, all we can do is speculate until we get samples back to the lab on the lander.”

The conversation resumed then, and Seth soon realized it wasn’t the robot’s postmortem; it was his. Or at least, his program’s—and therefore the astrobiology team’s.

“Tantalizing as the evidence is, we can’t risk running that program again,” Dr. Helberg said. “At least, not until it is revised. It is far too accident-prone. Just like its creator.”

He meant Dr. Beshni, Seth knew, but he couldn’t help taking it personally. He wanted to defend the program, but a warning look from Alyssa kept him quiet. He dreaded having to break the news to his mentor, and prayed she wouldn’t be out of surgery for at least a week. Somehow, he needed to redeem the program before she found out. Biological research couldn’t be put on ice now. There was too much at stake.

“What about the drones?” he asked. “Have we found out who’s running them?”

“It’s a Chinese program, apparently,” said a white-haired South African whom Seth knew only as Dr. Gault. “You may remember their moonshot a decade ago, when the spacecraft was lost. My guess is that it was simply using the moon for a gravitational assist so it could beat us to Titan and show us up. We haven’t yet been able to talk to anyone in charge.”

“What did the writing on it say?”

Alyssa answered. “It just said dàhuángfēng, Bumblebee. The name of the drone, apparently. Cute, but a phone number would have been more helpful.”

“Why do you ask?” Dr. Helberg said icily.

“Just thinking we could get them to help.”

Someone down the table said, “Even a hundred drones couldn’t lift the robot back to the top of the cliff.”

The conversation turned to the upcoming press conference, and the mood got even more dour as they contemplated the public shaming ahead. Seth saw that he and Dr. Beshni would inevitably get scapegoated.

At last Dr. Helberg said, “The navigation team in Copenhagen is going to create new instructions to get the robot back to the lander. We can’t say anything more about the future until the robot is saved. Of course, once they have done that, if they succeed, we can ask them to look at our AI program and do something to fix it.”

Butcher it, Seth thought glumly. Make it so risk-averse it would never go anywhere interesting.

The meeting broke up soon after. When Seth returned to his office, he saw that the sun was low in the sky; the whole day had passed in what had seemed like a few minutes. He checked the news to see if anything had leaked; if so, it had been crowded out by breathless anticipation of the American launch, which hadn’t yet taken place. There was nothing about China.

“You want to go for a drink?” Alyssa said, looking in from the hallway.

He wanted the drink, but not in company where he would have to hide his head. “I think I’ll go home,” he said.

His brain was still spinning down dead-end paths when he came into the apartment where Amalia was watching live coverage of the American rocket on its launch pad. She muted the sound. “I heard you had a little accident today,” she said.

So the story was all over the university. He wasn’t going to be able to escape it: cockamamie Dr. Beshni and her reckless assistant. He slumped down on the couch beside her, took the glass of wine from her hand, and downed it in one breath.

“That bad?” she said.

That was the source of his frustration, he realized. “No,” he said, “it wasn’t bad at all. It was wonderful. I was on Titan, Amalia—in a way I could never be there in reality, because I didn’t have to worry about the cold, or the fact there’s no oxygen. I didn’t have to spend ninety percent of my attention worrying about surviving, as those poor chumps on Mars are going to have to do. They’re going to regress to survivalists: worrying about how to get water and air and food, how to deal with bone loss and radiation. I was there in a body designed for the environment, and in ten minutes I was already doing science, making discoveries. All I want now is to go back. And the chances of that seem really slim now.”

She gave him a hug, which was nice, but didn’t really solve his problem.

“I think this Titan bug is contagious,” she said. “It’s all Dannika could talk about, too.”

“Did she see our press conference or something?”

“No, she’s got some sort of new video game about Titan. She’s playing it now.”

“Good,” he said gloomily. “Maybe she’ll be the next one in the family to go.”

“I’ve got Indian takeout,” she said. “Should I warm it up?”

“Sure,” he said. He didn’t want to sit drinking wine all evening, like a loser.

While Amalia was in the kitchen, he wandered into Tidbit’s room to see what she was doing. She was wearing her VR goggles and earbuds, but a display related to the game was up on the screen of her laptop. The graphics immediately drew Seth’s attention. They showed a map of Titan’s lake district—a strikingly accurate map. Whoever had put this together had done their homework, and timed the release perfectly. The map was littered with little symbols in a rainbow of colors.

“Hey, T,” he said, pulling up a chair next to her. “What’re you doing?”

She pulled out one earbud. “It’s a Titan game,” she said. “I have to tag interesting things. If my tags turn out to be good, I’ll get more time tomorrow.”

She peeked out from under her goggles and pointed at the map. “The magenta ones are my tags,” she said. “I chose the color.”

The tags were clustered around the southern coast of Ligeia Mare, exactly where he had been earlier that day.

“Can I try?” he asked.

She handed over the goggles. Immediately, he was back on Titan, flying like a bird over the coastline. The graphics were hyper-realistic, and very accurate—the rugged shore, the orange sky. He could almost feel the chill air whipping by, and smell the simulated tang of methane rain. “How do you control it?” he asked.

“You can’t, really,” Tidbit said. “It goes where it wants to go, but it’s attracted by other people’s tags. The thing is to see something new.”

“Have you seen a broken-down robot on the shore?” he said wryly.

“Oh, yes, that was tagged long ago.”

Just then, his viewpoint swooped downward with jaw-clenching speed, and he saw something moving below him like gnats, like birds—like drones.

He tore the goggles off to look at Tidbit. “Where did you get this?”

From the bedroom door, Amalia explained, “She got it from school. Her class won a lottery to participate. What’s the matter?”

“This isn’t a game. This is real.”

He couldn’t believe it. They were letting children run the drones?

“Give me the goggles back,” Tidbit said. “You’re using up my time.”

Amalia handed him a carton of biryani and a note from Tidbit’s teacher. He set down the carton and scanned the note. It gave a numerical Internet address and codes for logging into the game at a particular time. Farther down, there was a paragraph explaining that it was a global citizen science project from a Chinese software company.

“Tidbit,” he said tensely, “are you anywhere near the broken robot?”

She was back on Titan, absorbed in what she was seeing. “I think so,” she said.

He realized that her drone was symbolized by a flashing magenta dot on the map. He seized the touchscreen and zoomed in on the symbol. At a larger scale, the map became extraordinarily detailed. In fact, it wasn’t a map at all; it was aerial photos, pieced together from the feeds of a dozen drones. Every few seconds it refreshed, filling in new spots. They were mapping Titan at an extraordinary rate.

“I can’t imagine how much processing power this is taking,” Seth marveled.

There was a cluster of tags down the coast from Tidbit’s drone. He centered the spot on the screen and zoomed in. The detail wasn’t quite clear enough to see the robot, but the spot was labeled in Chinese characters. Mixed among them were three European letters, ESA. “That’s got to be the robot,” he said. The nearby terrain looked right—there was the cliff, and the ledge he had gone out on to look into the sea. He scanned eastward down the coast till he came to Tidbit’s drone at the mouth of a river.

“Tidbit, put a tag there.”

“Why?” she said. “There’s nothing interesting.”

“Yes, there is. A river with a wide valley. A gradual slope the robot can get up.”

On the map, he followed the river southward until a tributary came into it from the right; then he followed the tributary. The detail ended, giving way to the blurry, useless radar images. But when he zoomed out, he saw a tag on a spot about a kilometer inland that could only be the lander. “This has to be the stream that runs through the gully near the lander,” he said. “The robot might get its feet wet, but it can get back.”

“My time’s almost up,” Tidbit said. “I’m going to lose the connection.”

“No! Not yet!” Feverishly, Seth started saving screen shots of the map along the route from the lander to the robot. He had just saved the next to the last when the screen went blank.

Tidbit gave a cry of disappointment. But Seth gave her an ecstatic hug. “Tidbit, you’re a star,” he said. “Where’s my phone?”

Kjeld answered on the third ring. There was a lot of background noise. “Seth, where are you? We’re all at Zorro’s,” he said.

“No time for drinking,” Seth said. “I’ve got some information to pass on to the navigation team in Copenhagen. Are you in touch with them?”

“I can be,” Kjeld said slowly. “What sort of information?”

“I’ve got a route to get the robot home. Here, I’ll send you the first part of the map.”

The background noise fell quiet. He could imagine them all, clustered around Kjeld’s phone. “Where did you get this?” Kjeld said.

“You know those drones?”

“Yes, we haven’t been able to find out who’s controlling them.”

“That’s because it’s children controlling them. School children all over the world. I got it from my daughter. Never mind, I’ll fill you in later. The important thing is, they’ve mapped most of the route between the lander and the robot. Here, I’ll send the rest of the images.”

“Holy crap,” Kjeld said as he received the screen shots.

“Can you pass these on?”

“Ja,” Kjeld said, momentarily sounding Swedish.

“Sorry if I broke up the party,” Seth said, feeling not a bit sorry.

“Don’t mention it. Now get off my phone.”

Seth hung up, feeling good for the first time in hours, and gave Tidbit a high five. They all went out to the living room, where Amalia poured some more wine for Seth and herself, fruit juice for Tidbit. The muted television was still covering the American launch, but now a reporter was on the screen. Amalia turned up the sound.

“. . . will be rescheduled in approximately four days. If you’re just joining us, the launch has been scrubbed due to a malfunction in the hydraulic system . . .”

“Who cares?” Tidbit said.

“That’s right,” Seth said. “We don’t need a pokey old rocket ship. We’ve been there.”

Amalia gave him a hug. “That’s not for saving the robot,” she whispered. “That’s for being a good dad.”

He realized it was true, and he liked it. They really were a family now.

And they had all been to space. The American way was never going to get them there. The European way would only get the elite experts there. The Chinese way had gotten everyone there, even Tidbit. And all over the world, kids and space buffs and students were going to be able to go. It was against all the rules of institutional science—it was undisciplined, tumultuous, proletarian. But once the public found out they could ride a drone through the clouds of Titan, the reaction would be ecstatic.

And some day, perhaps the physicists would solve the time-delay problem with some quantum magic, and they could all be there in real time, building things and solving problems and exploring, and still be able to breathe and eat curried chicken when they were done.

It wasn’t just the solar system that looked different now. So did Earth.

©2018 by Carolyn Ives Gilman. First English language publication. Originally published in Chinese by the Future Affairs Administration. The story is inspired by “Technology and the Good Future” SF Workshop, which is jointly hosted by Future Affairs Administration (Guokr Publishing) and Ant Financial Services Group in Hangzhou, China.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Carolyn Ives Gilman’s books include Dark Orbit, a space exploration adventure; Isles of the Forsaken and Ison of the Isles, a two-book fantasy about culture clash and revolution; and Halfway Human, a novel about gender and oppression. Her short fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, Fantasy and Science Fiction, The Year’s Best Science Fiction, Interzone, Universe, Full Spectrum, Realms of Fantasy, and others.  She has been nominated for the Nebula Award three times and for the Hugo twice. Gilman lives in Washington, D.C., and works as a freelance writer and museum consultant.  She is also author of seven nonfiction books about North American frontier and Native history.

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

A Temporary Embarrassment in Spacetime

Charlie Jane Anders | 10616 words

1.

Sharon’s head itched from all the fake brain implants, and the massive cybernetic headdress was giving her a cramp in her neck. But the worst discomfort of all was having to pretend to be the loyal servant of a giant space blob. Pretending to be a thing instead of a person. This was bringing back all sorts of ugly memories from her childhood.

The Vastness was a ball of flesh in space, half the size of a regular solar system, peering out into the void with its billions of slimy eyemouths. It orbited a blue giant sun, Naxos, which used to have a dozen planets before The Vastness ate them all. That ring around The Vastness wasn’t actually a ring of ice or dust, like you’d see around a regular planet. Nope—it was tens of thousands of spaceships that were all docked together by scuzzy umbilicals, and they swarmed with humans and other people, who all lived to serve The Vastness.

The Vastness didn’t really talk much, except to bellow “I am everything!” into every listening device for a few light-years in any direction, and also directly into the minds of its human acolytes.

After five days, Sharon was getting mighty sick of hearing that voice yelling in her ear. “I am everything!” The Vastness roared. “You are everything!” Sharon shouted back, which was the standard response. Sharon really needed a shower—bathing wasn’t a big priority among the devotees of The Vastness—and she was getting creeped out from staring into the eyes of people who hadn’t slept in forever. (The Vastness didn’t sleep, so why should its servants?)

“We’re finally good to go,” said Kango’s voice in Sharon’s earpiece, under the knobby black cone she was wearing over her cranium.

“Thank Hall and Oates,” Sharon subvocalized back.

She was standing in a big orange antechamber aboard one of the large tributary vessels in the ring around The Vastness, and she was surrounded by other people wearing the same kind of headgear. Except that their headgear was real, and they really were getting messages from The Vastness, and they would probably not be thrilled to know that her fake headgear actually contained the ship’s hypernautic synchrotrix, which she’d stolen hours earlier.

Sharon and Kango had a client back on Earthhub Seven who would pay enough chits for that synchrotrix to cover six months’ worth of supplies. Plus some badly needed upgrades to their ship, the Spicy Meatball. If she could only smuggle it out of here without the rest of these yo-yos noticing.

Kango had finally spoofed The Vastness’s embarkation catechism, so the Meatball could separate from the ring without being instantly blown up. Sharon started edging toward the door.

“I am everything!” The Vastness shouted through every speaker and every telepathic implant on the tributary ship, including Sharon’s earpiece.

“You are everything!” Sharon shouted . . . just a split second later than everyone else in the room.

She was halfway to the door, which led to an airlock, which led to a long interstitial passageway, which led to a junction, which led to a set of other ships’ antechambers, beyond which was the airlock to the Meatball, which they’d disguised to look just like another one of these tributary ships.

Sharon tried to look as though she was just checking the readings on one of the control panels closer to the exit to this tributary ship. The synchrotrix was rattling around inside her big headdress, and she had to be careful not to damage it, since it was some incredibly advanced design that nobody else in the galaxy had. Sharon was so close to the exit. If she could just . . .

“Sister,” a voice behind her said. “What are you doing over there? How do your actions serve The Vastness?”

She turned to see a man with pale skin and a square face that looked ridiculous under his big cybernetic Pope hat, staring at her. Behind him, two other acolytes were also staring.

“Brother, I . . .” Sharon groped around on the control table behind her. Her hand landed on a cup of the nutritious gruel that the servants of The Vastness lived on. “I, uh, I was just making sure these neutron actuator readings were aligned with, uh, the—”

“That screen you are looking at is the latrine maintenance schedule,” the man said.

“Right. Right! I was concerned that The Vastness wouldn’t want us to have a faulty latrine, because, um . . .”

“I am everything!” The Vastness shouted.

“Because, I mean, if we had to wear diapers—you are everything!—then I mean, we wouldn’t be able to walk as quickly if The Vastness might require when it summons . . .”

Now everybody was staring at Sharon. She was so damn close to the door.

“Why did you not make your response to the Call of The Vastness immediately?”

“I was just, uh, so overcome with love for The Vastness, I was momentarily speechless.” Sharon kept looking at the man while groping her way to the door.

The man pulled out a gun—a Peacebreaker 5000, a nice model, which would have been worth some chits back on Earthhub Seven—and aimed it at her. “Sister,” he said. “I must restrain you and deliver you to the Head Acolyte for this sector, who will determine whether you—”

Sharon did the only thing she could think of. She shouted, “I am everything!”

The man blinked as she spoke the words reserved only for The Vastness. For a second, his mind couldn’t even process what he had just heard—and then the cupful of cold gruel hit him in the face.

The man lowered his gun just long enough for Sharon to make a lunge for it. Her headdress cracked, and the synchrotrix fell out. She caught it with her left hand while she grabbed for the gun with her right hand. The man was trying to aim the gun at her again, and she head-butted him. The gun went off, hitting one of the walls of the ship and causing a tiny crack to appear.

Both of the women had jumped on Sharon and the man, and now there were three acolytes trying to restrain her and pry the gun and synchrotrix from her hands. She bit one of the women, but the other one had a chokehold on her.

“I am everything!” shouted The Vastness.

“You are everything!” responded everyone except Sharon.

By the time they’d finished giving the ritual response, Sharon had a firm grip on the gun, and it was aimed at the head of the shorter of the two women. “I’m leaving here,” Sharon said. “Don’t try to stop me.”

“My life means nothing,” the woman said, with the gun right against her cone-head. “Only The Vastness has meaning.”

“I’ll shoot the other two after I shoot you,” said Sharon. She had reached the door. She shoved the woman into the antechamber, leapt through the doorway, and pushed the button to close the door behind her. The door didn’t close.

“Crap,” Sharon said.

“The overrides are on already. You won’t escape,” the woman Sharon had threatened at gunpoint gloated. “Praise The Vastness!”

“Screw The Vastness,” said Sharon, aiming at the crack in the ship’s hull and pulling the trigger on the Peacebreaker 5000. Then she took off running.

2.

“You took your time.” Kango was already removing his own fake headdress and all the other ugly adornments that had disguised him as one of The Vastness’s followers. “Did anybody see you slip away?”

“You could say that.” Sharon ran into the Spicy Meatball’s control area and strapped herself into the copilot seat. “We have to leave. Now.” She felt the usual pang of gladness at seeing Kango again—even if they got blown up, they were going to get blown up together.

Just then, The Vastness howled, “I have been robbed! I am everything, and someone has stolen from Me!”

“I thought you were the stealthy one.” Kango punched the ship’s thrusters and they pushed away from The Vastness’s ring at two times escape velocity. “You’re always telling me that I make too much noise, I’m too prone to spontaneous dance numbers, I’m too—what’s the word—irrepressible, and you’re the one who knows how to just get in and get out. Or did I misinterpret your whole ‘I’m a master of stealth, I live in the shadows’ speech the other day?”

“Just drive,” Sharon hissed.

“You just think you’re better than me because I’m a single-celled organism, and you’re all multicellular,” said Kango, who looked to all outside appearances like an incredibly beautiful young human male with golden skin and a wicked smile. “You’re a cellist. Wait, is that the word? What do you call someone who discriminates against other people based on the number of cells in their body?”

They were already point three light-years away from The Vastness, and there was no sign of pursuit. Sharon let out a breath. She looked at the big ugly blob of scar tissue, with all of its eyemouths winking at her one by one, and at the huge metallic ring around its middle. The whole thing looked kind of beautiful in the light of Naxos, especially when you were heading in the opposite direction at top speed.

“You know perfectly well that I don’t hold your monocellularity against you,” Sharon told Kango in a soothing tone. “And next time, I will be happy to let you be the one to go into the heart of the monster and pull out its tooth, and yes, I know that’s a mixed metaphor, but . . .”

“Uh, Sharon?”

“. . . but I don’t care, because I need a shower lasting a week, not to mention some postindustrial-strength solvent to get all this gunk off my head.”

“Sharon. I think we have a bit of an issue.”

Sharon stopped monologuing and looked at the screen, where she’d just been admiring the beauty of The Vastness and its ring of ships a moment earlier. The ring of ships was peeling ever so slowly away from The Vastness and forming itself into a variation of a standard pursuit formation—the variation was necessary because the usual pursuit formation didn’t include several thousand Joykiller-class ships and many assorted others.

“Uh, how many ships is that?”

“That is all of the ships. That’s how many.”

“We’re going to be cut into a million pieces and fed to every one of The Vastness’s mouths,” Sharon said. “And they’re going to keep us alive and conscious while they do it.”

“Can they do that?” Kango jabbed at the Meatball’s controls, desperately trying to get a little more speed out of the ship.

“Guys, I’m going as fast as I can,” said Noreen, the ship’s computer, in a petulant tone. “Poking my buttons won’t make me go any faster.”

“Sorry, Noreen,” said Sharon.

“Wait, I have a thought,” said Kango. “The device you stole, the hypernautic synchrotrix. It functions by creating a Temporary Embarrassment in spacetime, which lets The Vastness and all its tributary ships transport themselves instantaneously across the universe in search of prey. Right? But what makes it so valuable is the way that it neutralizes all gravity effects. An object the size of The Vastness should throw planets out of their orbits and disrupt entire solar systems whenever it appears, but it doesn’t.”

“Sure. Yeah.” Sharon handed the synchrotrix to Kango, who studied it frantically. “So what?”

“Well, so,” Kango said. “If I can hook it into Noreen’s drive systems . . .” He was making connections to the device as fast as he could. “I might be able to turn Noreen into a localized spatial Embarrassment generator. And that, in turn, means that we can do something super super clever.”

Kango pressed five buttons at once, triumphantly, and . . . nothing happened.

Kango stared at the tiny viewscreen. “Which means,” he said again, “we can do something super super SUPER clever.” He jabbed all the buttons again (causing Noreen to go “ow”), and then something did happen: A great purple-and-yellow splotch opened up directly behind the Spicy Meatball, and all of the ships chasing them were stopped dead. A large number of the pursuit ships even crashed into each other because they had been flying in too tight a formation.

“So long, cultists!” Kango shouted. He turned to Sharon, still grinning. “I created a Local Embarrassment, which collided with the Temporary Embarrassment fields that those ships were already generating, and set up a chain reaction in which this region of spacetime became Incredibly Embarrassed. Which means . . .”

“. . . none of those ships will be going anywhere for a while,” Sharon said.

“See what I mean? I may only have one cell, but it’s a brain cell.” He whooped and did an impromptu dance in his seat. “Like I said: You’re the stealthy one, I’m the flashy one.”

“I’m the one who needs an epic shower.” Sharon pulled at all the crap glued to her head while also putting the stolen synchrotrix safely into a padded strongbox. She was still tugging at the remains of her headgear when she moved toward the rear of the ship in search of its one bathroom, and she noticed something moving in the laundry compartment.

“Hey, Kango?” Sharon whispered as she came back into the flight deck. “I think we have another problem.”

She put her finger to her lips, then led him back to the laundry area, where she pulled the compartment open with a sudden tug to reveal a slender young woman curled up in a pile of dirty flight suits, wearing the full headgear of an acolyte of The Vastness. The girl looked up at them.

“Praise The Vastness,” she said. “Have we left the ring yet? I yearn to help you spread the good word about The Vastness to the rest of the galaxy! All hail The Vastness!”

Sharon and Kango just looked at each other, as if each trying to figure out how they could make this the other one’s fault.

3.

Sharon and Kango had known each other all their lives, and they were sort of married and sort of united by a shared dream. If a single-celled organism could have a sexual relationship with anybody, Kango would have made it happen with Sharon. And yet, a lot of the time, they kind of hated each other. Cooped up with Noreen on the Spicy Meatball, when they weren’t being chased by literal-minded cyborgs or sprayed with brainjuice from the brainbeasts of Noth, they started going a little crazy. Kango would start trying to osmose the seat cushions and Sharon would invent terrible games. They were all they had, but they were kind of bad for each other all the same. Space was lonely, and surprisingly smelly, at least if you were inside a ship with artificial life support.

They’d made a lot of terrible mistakes in their years together, but they’d never picked up a stowaway from a giant-space-testicle cult before. This was a new low. They immediately started doing what they did best: bicker.

“I like my beer lukewarm and my equations ice-cold,” Kango said. “Just sayin’.”

“Hey, don’t look at me,” Sharon said.

The teenage girl, whose name was TheVastnessIsAllWonderfulJaramellaLovesTheVastness, or Jara for short, was tied to the spare seat in the flight deck with thick steelsilk cords. Since Jara had figured out that she’d stowed away on the wrong ship and these people weren’t actually fellow servants of The Vastness, she’d stopped talking to them. Because why bother to speak to someone who doesn’t share the all-encompassing love of The Vastness?

“We don’t have enough food, or life support, or fuel, to carry her where we’re going,” Kango said.

“We can ration food or stop off somewhere and sell your Rainbow Cow doll collection to buy more. We can make oxygen by grabbing some ice chunks from the nearest comet and breaking up the water molecules. We can save on fuel by going half-speed or, again, sell your Rainbow Cow dolls to buy fuel.”

“Nobody is selling my Rainbow Cow dolls,” Kango said. “Those are my legacy. My descendants will treasure them, if I ever manage to reproduce somehow.” He made a big show of trying to divide into two cells, which looked like he was just having a hissy fit.

“Point is, we’re stuck with her now. Praise The Vastness,” Sharon sighed.

“Praise The Vastness!” Jara said automatically, not noticing the sarcasm in Sharon’s voice.

“There’s also the fact that they can probably track her via the headgear she’s wearing. Not to mention she may still be in telepathic contact with The Vastness itself, and we have no way of knowing when she’ll be out of range of The Vastness’s mental influence.”

“Oh, that’s easy,” Sharon said. “We’ll know she’s out of range of mental communication with The Vastness when—”

“You are everything!” Jara shouted in response to a message from The Vastness.

“—when she stops doing that. Listen, I’m going to work on disabling, and maybe dismantling, her headgear. You work on rationing food and fuel, and figuring out a way to get more without sacrificing the Rainbow Cows.”

“Do not touch my sacred headpiece,” the girl said at the exact same moment that Kango said, “Stay away from my Rainbow Cows.”

“Guys,” said Noreen. “I have an incoming transmission from Earthhub Seven.”

“Can you take a message?” Kango said. “We’re a smidge busy here.”

“It’s from Senior Earthgov Administrator Mandre Lewis. Marked urgent.”

“You are everything!” Jara cried while struggling harder against her bonds.

“Okay, fine.” Kango turned to Sharon. “Please keep her quiet. Noreen, put Mandre on.”

“You can’t silence me!” Jara struggled harder. “I will escape and aid in your recapture. All ten million eyemouths of The Vastness will feast on your still-living flesh! You will—”

Sharon managed to put a sound-dampening field up around Jara’s head, cutting off the sound of her voice, just as Mandre appeared on the cruddy low-res screen in the middle of the flight console. Getting a state-of-the-art communications system had not been a priority for Kango and Sharon, since that would only encourage people to try and communicate with them more often, and who wanted that?

“Kango, Sharon,” Mandre Lewis said, wearing her full ceremonial uniform—even the animated sash that scrolled with all of her many awards and titles. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but we need your assistance.”

“We helped you one time,” Kango said. “Okay, three times, but two of those were just by accident because you had used reverse psychology. Point is, I am not your lackey. Or your henchman. Find another man to hench. Right, Sharon?”

Sharon nodded. “No henching. As Hall and Oates are my witness.”

“You are everything!” Jara mouthed soundlessly.

“Listen,” said Lewis. “You do this one thing for me, I can expunge your criminal records, even the ones under your other names. And I can push through the permits on that empty space at Earthhub Seven so you can finally open that weird thing you wanted. That, what was it called?”

“Restaurant,” Sharon breathed, like she couldn’t believe she was even saying the word aloud.

“Restaurant!” Kango clapped his hands. “That’s all we’ve ever wanted.”

“It sounds perverted and sick, this whole thing where you make food for strangers and they give you chits for it. Why don’t you just have sex for money like honest, decent people? Never mind, I don’t want to know the answer to that. Anyway, if you help me with this one thing, I can get you permission to open your ‘restaurant.’ ”

“Wow.” Kango’s head was spinning. Literally, it was going around and around, at about one revolution every few seconds. Sharon leaned down and slapped him until his head settled back into place.

“We’ll do it,” Sharon said. “Do you want us to infiltrate the spacer isolationists of the broken asteroid belt? Or go underground as factory workers in the Special Industrial Solar Systems? You want us to steal from the lizard people of Dallos IV? Whatever you want, we’re on it.”

“None of those,” said Mandre. “We need you to go back to Liberty House and get back inside your former place of, er, employment. We’ve heard reports that the Courtiers are developing some kind of super-weapon that could ruin everybody’s day. We need you to go in there and get the schematics for us.”

“Holy shit.” Sharon nearly threw something at the tiny viewscreen. “You realize that this is a suicide mission? The Courtiers regard both of us as total abominations. We can’t open a restaurant if we’re dead!”

Lewis made a “not my problem” face. “Just get it done. Or don’t even bother coming back to Earthhub Seven.”

Kango’s head started spinning in the opposite direction from the one it had been spinning in a moment earlier.

4.

They were about halfway to the outer solar systems of Liberty House, and they decided that Jara had probably passed out of range of The Vastness’s telepathic communication. Plus, they were pretty sure they’d disabled any tracking devices that might have been inside Jara’s headdress. So, Sharon leaned over the seat that Jara was still tied to.

“I know you can hear me, even though we can’t hear you. If I turn off the dampening field, do you promise not to yell about The Vastness?”

Jara just stared at her.

Sharon shrugged, then reached over and disabled the dampening field. Immediately, Jara started yelling, “The Vastness is all! The Vastness sees you! The Vastness sees everybody! The Vastness will feast on your flesh with its countless mouths! The Va—”

Sharon turned the dampening field back on with a sigh. “You’ve probably never known a life apart from The Vastness, so this is the first time you haven’t heard its voice in your head. Right? But you stowed away on our ship for a reason. You can claim it was so you could be a missionary and tell the rest of the galaxy how great The Vastness is, but we both know that you had to have some other reason for wanting to see the galaxy. Even if you can’t admit it to yourself right now.”

Jara just kept shouting about The Vastness and its boundless wonderful appetite, without making any sound.

“Fine. Have it your way. Let me know if you need to use the facilities or if you get hungry. Maybe I’ll feed you one of Kango’s Rainbow Cows.” (This provoked a loud and polysyllabic “noooo” from Kango, who was in the next compartment over.)

When Sharon wandered aft, Kango was waist-deep in boxes of supplies, looking for something they could use to disguise themselves long enough to get inside Liberty House.

“Do we have a hope in hell of pulling this off?” she asked.

“If we can get the permits, absolutely,” Kango said. “We might have to borrow some chits to get the restaurant up and running, but I know people who won’t charge a crazy rate. And I already have ideas of what kind of food we can serve. Did you know restaurants used to have this thing called a Me-N-U? It was a device that automatically chose the perfect food for me and the perfect food for you.”

“I meant, do we have any hope of getting back inside of Liberty House without being clocked as escaped Divertissements and obliterated in a slow, painful fashion?”

“Oh.” Kango squinted at the piles of glittery underpants in his hands. “No. That, we don’t have the slightest prayer of doing. I was trying to focus on the positive.”

“We need a plan,” Sharon said. “You and I are on file with the Courtiers, and there are any of a thousand scans that will figure out who we are the moment we show up. But Mandre is right; we know the inner workings of Liberty House better than anybody. We were made there, we lived there. It was our home. There has to be some way to play the Courtiers for fools.”

“Here’s the problem,” said Kango. “Even if you and I were able to disguise ourselves enough to avoid being recognized as the former property of the Excellent Good Time Crew, there’s absolutely no way we could hide what we are. None whatsoever. Anyone in the service of the Courtiers will recognize you as a monster, and me as an extra, at a glance.”

“I know, I know,” Sharon raised her hands.

“We wouldn’t get half a light-year inside the House before they would be all over us with the biometrics and the genescans, and there’s no way around those.”

“I know!” Sharon felt like weeping. They shouldn’t have taken this mission. Mandre had dangled a slim chance at achieving their wildest dreams, and they’d lunged for it like rubes. “I know, okay?”

“I mean, you’d need to have a human being, an actual honest-to-Blish human being, who was in on the scam. And it’s not like we can just pick up one of those on the nearest asteroid. So, unless you’ve got some other bright—” Kango stopped.

Kango and Sharon stared at each other for a moment without talking, then looked over at Jara, who was still tied to her chair, shouting soundlessly about the wonders of The Vastness.

“Makeover?” Kango said.

“Makeover.” Sharon sighed. She still felt like throwing up.

5.

“Greetings and tastefully risqué taunts, O visitors whose sentience will be stipulated for now, pending further appraisal,” said the man on the viewscreen, whose face was surrounded by a pink-and-blue cloud of smart powder. His cheek had a beauty mark that flashed different colors, and his eyes kept changing from skull sockets to neon spirals to cartoon eyeballs. “What is your business with Liberty House, and how may we pervert you?”

Kango and Sharon both looked at Jara, who glared at them both. Then she turned her baleful look toward the viewscreen. “Silence, wretch,” she said, speaking the words they’d forced her to memorize. “I do not speak to underthings.” Kango and Sharon both gave her looks of total dismay, and she corrected herself: “Underlings. I do not speak to underlings. I am the Resplendent Countess Victoria Algentsia, and these are my playservants. Kindly provide me with an approach vector to the central Pleasure Nexus, and instruct me as to how I may speak to someone worthy of my attention.”

They turned off the comms before the man with the weird eyes could even react.

“Ugh,” Kango said. “That was . . . not good.”

“I’ve never pretended to be a Countess before,” said Jara. “I don’t really approve of pretending to be anything. The Vastness requires total honesty and realness from its acolytes. Also, how do I know you’ll keep your end of our bargain?”

“Because we’re good, honest folk,” said Sharon, kicking Kango before he could even think of having a facial expression. “We’ll return you to The Vastness, and you’ll be a hero because you’ll have helped defeat a weapon that could have been a threat to its, er, magnificence.”

“I don’t trust either of you,” said Jara.

“That’s a good start,” said Kango. “Where we’re going, you shouldn’t trust anybody, anybody at all.” By some miracle, the man with the cloud of smart powder around his face had given them an approach vector to Salubrious IV, the central world of the Pleasure Nexus, the main solar system of Liberty House. Either the man had actually believed Jara was a countess, or he had decided their visit would afford some amusement to somebody. Or both.

“So, I’m supposed to be a fancy noble person,” said Jara, who was still wearing her tattered rags apart from a splash of colorful makeup and some fake jewels over her headdress. “And yet, I’m flying in this awful old ship, with just the two of you as my servants? What are you two supposed to be, anyway?”

“We were made here,” said Kango. “I’m an extra. She’s a monster.”

“You don’t need to know what we were.” Sharon shot Kango a look. “All you need to know is, we’re perfectly good servants. This ship is an actual pleasure skimmer from Salubrious, and you’re going to claim that you decided to go off on a jaunt. We’re creating a whole fake hedonic calculus for you. The good thing about Liberty House is, there are a million Courtiers, and the idea of keeping tabs on any of them is repugnant.”

“This society is evil and monstrous,” said Jara. “The Vastness will come and devour it entire.”

“Of course, of course,” said Kango with a shrug. “So, we have a few hours left to teach you how to hold your painstick, and which skewer to use with which kind of sugarblob, and the right form of address for all five hundred types of Courtiers, so you can pass for a member of the elite. Not to mention how to walk in scamperpants. Ready to get started?”

Jara just glared at him.

Meanwhile, Sharon went aft to look at the engines, because their “plan,” if you wanted to call it that, required them to do some crazy flying inside the inner detector grid of Salubrious IV, to get right up to the computer core while Kango and Jara provided a distraction.

“Nobody asked me if I wanted to go home,” said Noreen while Sharon was poking around in her guts. “I wouldn’t have minded being at least consulted here.”

“Sorry,” said Sharon. “Neither of us is happy about going back either. We got too good an offer to refuse.”

“I’ve been in contact with some of the other ships since we got inside Liberty House,” Noreen said. “They don’t care much one way or the other if we’re lying about our identity—ships don’t concern themselves with such petty business—but they did mention that the Courtiers have beefed up security rather a lot since we escaped for the first time. Also, some of the ships are taking up a betting pool on how long before we’re caught and sent into the Libidorynth.”

“I can’t believe the Libidorynth is still a thing,” Sharon said.

Sharon and Kango spent their scant remaining time making Jara look plausibly like a spoiled Countess who had been in deep space much too long, while Kango gave Jara a crash course in acting haughty and imperious. “When in doubt, pretend you’ve done too many dreamsluices, and you’re having a hard time remembering things,” said Kango.

“Silence, drone,” said Jara in an actually pretty good impersonation of the way a Courtier would speak to someone like Kango.

“We’ve got landing points,” said Noreen, and seconds later, the ship was making a jerky descent toward the surface of Salubrious IV. From a distance, the planet looked a hazy shade of brownish gray. But once you broke atmosphere, the main landmass was coated with towers of pure gold studded with purple, and the oceans had a sheen of platinum over them. They lowered the Spicy Meatball into the biggest concentration of gilded skyscrapers, and all the little details came into focus: the millions of faces and claws and bodies gazing and squirming from the sides of the buildings, the bejeweled windows and the shimmering mist of pleasure-gas floating around all of the uppermost levels. Gazing at her former home, Sharon felt an unexpected kick of nostalgia, or maybe even joyful recognition, alongside the ever-present terror of Hall and Oates save me, they’re going to put us in the Libidorynth.

They touched down, and Noreen seemed reluctant to open her hatch, because she was probably having the same terrifying flashbacks that were eating Sharon’s brain. Things Sharon hadn’t thought of in years—the cage they had kept her in, the “monster training,” the giggles of the people as she chased them around the dance floor, which turned to shrieks after she actually caught up with them. The painsticks. Sharon felt the bravado she’d spent years acquiring start to flake away.

As they stepped out of the hatch, a retinue of a hundred Witty Companions and assorted Fixers and Cleansers swarmed to surround them. “How may we pervert you?” they all asked, with an eagerness that made Sharon’s stomach twist into knots. They all felt obliged to declare their fealty to this long-lost, newly returned Countess right away, and this became deafening. One of the Witty Companions, who introduced himself as Barnadee, started listing all of the Courtiers who were dying to meet their cousin, but Jara gave him a sharp look and said that she was tired after her long journey.

“Of course, of course,” said Barnadee, bowing and flashing his multicolored strobe-lit genitalia as a show of respect. “We will show you to your luxurious and resplendent quarters, where any debauchery you may imagine will be available to you.”

Jara snorted at all of this nonsense—it was all pointless, because it did nothing to glorify The Vastness—but her disdain sounded enough like the petulance of a jaded hedonist that it only made Barnadee try harder to please her.

6.

“Drone, bring me more cognac and bacon,” said Jara, waving one finger. Sharon and Kango looked at each other, as if each trying to blame the other for turning this girl into their worst nightmare. They’d been on Salubrious IV for a week and a half, and you wouldn’t recognize Jara anymore. Her skin had been retro-sheened until it glowed, they had put jewels all over her face and neck, and she was wearing the newest, most fashionable clothes. But most of all, Jara had gotten used to having whatever she wanted, at the exact second she decided she wanted it. They were staying in one of the more modest suites of the Pleasure Nexus, with only seventeen rooms and a dozen organic assembly units—so it might take a few whole minutes to build a new slave for the Countess Victoria or create whatever meals or clothing she might desire. The walls were coated with living material, sort of like algae, that looked like pure gold (but was actually much more valuable) and had the capacity to feel pain, just in case someone might find it amusing to hear the golden walls howl with agony.

“I grow bored,” said Jara, as Sharon rushed over with her cognac-and-bacon. “When will there be more amusement for me?”

Sharon had a horrible feeling that she could not tell if Jara was faking it any longer. She’d had that feeling for a few days.

“Um,” said Sharon to Jara, “well, so there are five orgies this evening, including one featuring blood enemas and flesh-melting. Also, there’s that big formal evening party.”

“Is this the sort of party where you used to be the featured monster?” Jara held her cognac-and-bacon in both hands and gulped it, with just the sort of alacrity you’d expect from someone who’d only ever tasted gruel until two weeks before.

“Um, yes,” Sharon said. “They would turn me loose and I would chase the guests around and try to eat them. I’ve told you already.”

“And how did that make you feel?” Jara asked.

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

Sharon turned and looked at Kango, who was tending to the Countess’s assembly units but also double-checking that there were no listening devices in here so they could speak freely. Kango gave her the “all clear” signal.

“Let’s talk about you instead,” Sharon said to Jara. “Are you ready to go to the big party? It’s one thing to play-act at bossing Kango and me around in private. But at this party, you’ll see all sorts of weird things—depravities that The Vastness never prepared you for. And you can’t bat an eye at any of them.”

“I’ll do whatever I have to,” Jara said. “You said there’s a weapon here that’s a threat to The Vastness, and I’ll endure any horrors and monstrosities to protect The Vastness. Praise The Vastness!”

“Do you think she’s ready?” Sharon asked Kango, who shrugged.

“She’s got the attitude,” Kango said. Just a few hours earlier, Jara had made Kango go out and fetch her some still-living mollusk sushi from the market, and meanwhile she’d gotten Sharon to fabricate a tiny legion of pink fluffy shocktroopers for her amusement (they goose-stepped around and then all shot each other, because their aim was terrible).

“Thank you,” Jara said, “Drone.”

“But she’s still rusty on the finer points of Courtier behavior,” Kango said. “She doesn’t know a painstick from a soul-fork.”

“She’s a quick study. And she’ll have you to help her,” Sharon said. “As long as you don’t get all triggered by being back inside the Grand Wilding Center. I can’t even imagine.”

“You two,” Jara said out of nowhere. “You talk as though each of you was The Vastness to the other.”

“Yeah,” Kango said. “We’re a family, that’s why.”

Jara was shaking her head, like this was just another perversion among many that she’d encountered on her journey. “At least the people here in Liberty House care about something bigger than they are, even if it’s only a pointless amusement. You two, you are so small, and all you care for is each other. How can you stand to have no connection to greatness?”

“We had enough of other people’s greatness a long time ago,” Sharon said. “You start to realize that ‘something bigger than you are’ is usually just some kind of stupid mass hallucination. Or a giant scam.”

“I feel sorry for you.” Jara finished her cognac-and-bacon and gestured for more.

“You can pretend that you’re still pure,” Sharon said. “But you’ve been enjoying that cognac-and-bacon way, way too much. What do you think The Vastness would think about that? How can The Vastness be everything when it doesn’t have cognac-and-bacon? When it doesn’t even know what cognac-and-bacon IS?”

“Shut up, Drone,” Jara said—falling back into her “Countess” voice as a way out of this conversation.

“Keep an eye on her, okay?” Sharon whispered to Kango. “I really think there’s a part of her that wants to be her own person, but she just doesn’t know how.”

He shrugged and nodded at the same time.

And then they were surrounded by a few dozen other servants and Fixers, who had heard that the Countess Victoria was going to the evening’s most exclusive party and were there to help her become as resplendent as possible in hopes of winning some favor. So, there was no further chance to talk about their actual plans for stealing the specs on the secret weapon—but lots and lots of chances to obsess over whether the Countess should wear the weeping dolphin eyes or the blood-pouches.

At last, the Countess was ready to go to the party, and Sharon was preparing to peel off and sneak back to the Spicy Meatball. “Wish me luck,” she whispered to Kango.

“You’ve got this,” he whispered back. “We’re going to open our restaurant. We’ll serve all the classic food items: handburgers, Ruffalo wings, damplings, carry . . . It’ll be great.”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here,” said Sharon, kissing Kango on the cheek.

7.

The central computer core of the Pleasure Nexus looked like a big mossy rock floating over the city, between two giant esorotic spires of pure silver. But as the Spicy Meatball flew closer, the computer core looked less like a rock and more like some kind of ancient sauroid, with thick plates of spiky armor guarding its fleshy access points. They flew into its shadow.

Sharon was concentrating on navigating past the tiny guardbots flying around the computer core, while finding the exact vector that would allow the Spicy Meatball to come right up to the exposed patch of underbelly. And then Sharon and Noreen just had to hover there, directly underneath the computer core, where anybody could spot the ship’s impact-scarred hull, waiting for Kango’s diversion to happen. And obsessing about the thousand things that could go wrong.

“I’ve been telling the other ships about us,” said Noreen. “Our smuggling runs to the Scabby Castles, that time we conned those literal-minded cyborgs into thinking Kango was some kind of Cyber-King . . . They’re pretty jealous of us. The other ships might even give us a slight head start if it comes down to a pursuit. Although it wouldn’t make any difference, of course.”

“I appreciate the gesture,” said Sharon. She stared at the crappy little vidscreen, showing the undulating flesh of the computer core—just sitting there, a few inches away from their hull. She was regretting a lot of her recent life choices. She’d sworn for years that nobody was ever going to make her into an object again, but she’d willingly put herself back into that position—and the fact that she was “just pretending” didn’t make as much difference as she wanted. She felt bad that Kango, who’d had a rougher time than she had, was being forced to confront this awfulness again. And she was realizing that she’d projected a lot onto that Jara girl, as if a week or two of pretending to be a Countess would break a lifetime of conditioning and psychic linkage to a giant space glob. This was probably going to be a career-ending mistake.

“We got it,” Noreen said, just as Sharon was getting sucked into gloom. Their vidscreen was streaming some news reports about the Estimable Lord Vaughn Ticklesnout unexpectedly catching on fire and being chased by his own party monster. Some three hundred terrorist organizations had already claimed responsibility for this incident, most of them with completely silly names like the Persimmon Permission Proclamation, but the party had dissolved into total chaos. They picked up footage of the crowd scattering as a man on fire ran around and around, pursued by a bright blue naked woman who could have been Sharon’s twin sister.

“Great,” Sharon said. “I’m setting up the uplink. Let’s hope the distraction was distracting enough.” She started threading through layers of security protection, some of them newly added since she and Kango had escaped from Liberty House, and spoofing all of the certs that the computer demanded. There were riddles and silly questions along with strings of base-99 code that needed to be unraveled, but Sharon and Noreen worked together, and soon they had total leet-superuser access.

Sharon searched for any data on the new super-weapon and found it helpfully labeled “Brand New Excellent Super-Weapon.” A few more twists of the computer matrix, and she was instructing the computer to transfer all the data on the weapon.

“Uh,” said Noreen. “I think you might have made a mistake.”

“What?” said Sharon. “I asked it to send over everything it had on the super-weapon.”

“Check the cargo hold,” said Noreen. “Right next to the boxes of Rainbow Cows. The main computer just auto-docked with us a second ago.”

Sharon took a split second to process what Noreen had said, then took off running down to the cargo hold, where a squat red ovoid device, about the size of a human baby, had been deposited. The object made a faint grumbling noise, like a drunken old man who was annoyed at being woken up. “Oh, shit,” Sharon said.

“Please keep it down,” said the super-weapon. “Some of us are trying to rest.”

“Sorry,” Sharon said. “I just didn’t expect you to show up in person.”

“I go where they send me,” groaned the super-weapon. “All I want to do is get some rest until my big day. Which could be any day, since they never give me a timetable. That’s the problem with being the ultimate deterrent: people talk about using me a lot, but they never actually follow through.”

“Just how ultimate a deterrent are you?”

“Well, actually, I’m very ultimate. Ultimately ultimate, in fact.” The super-weapon seemed to perk up a little bit as it discussed its effectiveness. “If anybody tries to interfere with Liberty House’s sacred and innate right to seek amusement in any form they deem amusing, then I send a gravity pulse to the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy, causing it to, er, expand. Rather a lot. To the size of a galaxy, in fact.”

“That’s, er, pretty fucking ultimate.” Sharon felt as though she, personally, had swallowed a supermassive black hole. This was getting worse and worse. Added to her own low-single-digit estimation of her chances of survival, there was the realization that her former owners were much, much worse people than she’d ever fathomed. She was so full of terror and hatred, she saw two different shades of red at once.

“Hate to ruin your moment,” said Noreen, “but we’ve got another problem.”

“Don’t mind me,” said the super-weapon. “I’ll just go back to sleep. My name is Horace, by the by.”

Sharon rushed back to the flight deck, where the vidscreen showed Kango and Jara in the custody of several uniformed Fixers, as well as one of the senior Courtiers, a man named Hazelbeem who’d been famous back in Sharon’s day.

“We have captured your accomplices.” Hazelbeem’s lime-green coiffure wobbled as he talked. “And we are coming for you next! Prepare for a wonderfully agonizing death—accompanied by some quite delicious crunketizers, because this party left us with rather a lot of leftovers.”

“We have your bomb,” said Sharon into the viewscreen. “Your ultimate weapon. We’ll set it off unless you release our friends.”

“No, you won’t,” said Hazelbeem, who had a purple mustache that kept twirling and untwirling and twisting itself into complex shapes, “because you’re not completely stark raving mad.”

“Okay. It’s true; we won’t. But what does that say about you, creating something like that?”

Hazelbeem’s mustache shrugged elaborately, but the man himself had no facial expression.

“Leave us,” Kango shouted. “Get out of there! Take their stupid bomb with you. We’re not worth you sacrificing your lives to these assholes. Just go!”

“You know I can’t do that,” said Sharon.

“There are fifty-seven attack ships, approaching us from pretty much every possible direction,” said Noreen.

“Can we at least disable their stupid bomb permanently before they capture us?” said Sharon. “I’m guessing not. We’d need weeks to figure out how it works.”

“Hey,” Jara said, pushing herself forward. “I wanted to say, I guess you were kind of right about why I stowed away. I always wanted to be special, not just another one of a billion servants of The Vastness. And when I saw your ship about to disembark, I thought maybe I could help spread the word about The Vastness to the whole galaxy, and then I’d be the best acolyte ever. But it turned out the only way I could be special was as a fake Countess.”

“You were a great fake Countess, though,” Kango said, squirming next to her.

“Thanks. And thanks for taking me to that party,” Jara told her. “I got to see all sorts of things that I’d never even imagined. And it started me thinking maybe I really could find a way to reinvent myself as an individual, the way you two did. In fact, I’m starting to realize that . . . You are everything!”

“What the hell? You just said—”

“I can’t control it,” said Jara. “It’s like an instinctive response whenever—You are everything!”

And then they lost the signal, because a voice broke in on every single open frequency. The voice was shouting one thing over and over: “I am everything! I am everything! I am everything!”

“Uh,” said Sharon.

“So, you probably already guessed this,” said Noreen. “But sensors are showing that a Temporary Embarrassment the size of several planets has just appeared on the edge of the central pleasure nexus of Liberty House. The weather control systems on Salubrious IV are all working overtime.”

“You’re right; I did actually guess that,” said Sharon.

“The good news is, all the ships that were about to attack us have been diverted onto a new heading,” said Noreen.

“We gotta go rescue Kango,” said Sharon. “And Jara, I guess.”

“I have some excellent news,” came a plummy male voice from the cargo hold. Horace, the super-weapon. “My activation sequence has been initiated. It’s the moment I’ve been waiting for my whole life!”

8.

Hazelbeem, whose full name was Hazelbeem Sternforke Paddleborrow the XXVIIth, was standing in front of the Grand Wilding Suites and Superior Fun Center, where the party had been held. He had a half-dozen Fixers with him, and they were holding Kango and Jara in chains as the Spicy Meatball landed on the front lawn (which screamed and tried to bite the Meatball’s landing struts).

“So! Not only did you steal our top secret ultimate weapon,” said Hazelbeem, his mustache knotted in anger, “but you brought the wrath of the most revolting giant monster in the galaxy down on us. Were I an existentialist masochist, this would be my happiest day ever. Too bad I am an objectivist sadist instead.”

“Just let my friends go,” said Sharon. “We can help. We know what The Vastness wants.”

“You are everything!” shouted Jara.

“We are past the point of negotiation,” said Hazelbeem. “We have already activated the weapon on board your ship as soon as we detected a major threat to our way of life. If we cannot continue the absolute pursuit of amusement, with zero limitations, then there’s no reason for this galaxy to continue existing. I must say, when we created you and your friend here”—he gestured at Kango—“we did not imagine it could ever lead to so many unamusing incidents.”

“This just proves that amusement is subjective,” said Kango, struggling against his chains. “I’ve been highly amused by many of today’s events.”

“You are everything!”

“You were made as a brothel extra,” said Hazelbeem to Kango. “You weren’t even supposed to have a mind of your own. You’re a single-celled organism, are you not? Made to appear like a beautiful young man, to stand in the background of the crowd scenes at a brothel. Something must have gone very wrong—perhaps you received too high a dose of neuropeptides in the vat.”

“I may only have one cell,” said Kango, “but you’ve just been nucleused.”

“I don’t even know what that means.” Hazelbeem’s mustache crinkled.

“It was supposed to be a play on the fact that I have a single nucleus, and I’m . . . Oh, just forget I said anything.”

“Already forgotten,” said Hazelbeem.

“You are everything!”

“Can you stop shouting that?” Hazelbeem said to Jara. “It’s giving me a headache.”

“We’ve been trying, believe me,” said Sharon.

“It’s a reflex,” Jara told Hazelbeem. “I belong to The Vastness no matter what I do. I was foolish to think anything mattered except for The Vastness. I’m probably going to be punished for doubting even a little, in my heart.”

“You are a very tiresome little person,” Hazelbeem told her.

The sky was churning with angry black swirlies, which reminded Sharon of one of the first parties at which she’d been the designated monster, when the Marquis of Bloopabloopasneak had set off some kind of weather bomb left over from one of the old galactic wars. Five hundred-odd people had died in the hurricanes and blizzards before the Pleasure Nexus’s weather-control systems had regained control, and the Marquis of Bloopabloopasneak had played really loud glam-clash music to drown out the screams and the roaring of the elements.

Hazelbeem was looking at the big fob hanging from his inner jacket (which was made of tiny living people, all of them squirming in a vain attempt to escape from the stitching that stuck them together). “That hypertrophic organism and its fleet of ships have torn through our planetary defenses in the worst disaster since that all-you-can-eat buffet escaped from its trays and grew until it devoured an entire planet. I blame! I really do. I blame.”

“Just let my friends go, and we’ll deal with The Vastness for you.” Sharon shouted to make herself heard over the howling in the sky. “There’s no need for any of this.”

“This is what happens when playthings try to think for themselves,” Hazelbeem snorted. “First they start trying to act like people, and before you know it, they—”

Sharon ate Hazelbeem. This happened too quickly for anybody to react. One second, Hazelbeem was working himself up into a tirade about toys that get ideas above their station, and the next, Sharon’s mouth expanded to several times its normal size and just gobbled him up. She spat out his boots a second later.

“Ugh,” Sharon said. “I promised myself I would never do that again. But there’s provocation, and then there’s provocation. I’ve had a lot of pent-up rage these past few days.” She looked at the gaggle of Fixers who were holding her friends prisoner and yelled, “Let my friends go, or you’re next!”

“Whatever you say!” the head Fixer stammered as she unlocked Kango and Jara. “We all just want to be with our families—or possibly go to an end-of-the-galaxy blood orgy. One of those. Bye!” The Fixers all took off running in different directions, leaving Sharon, Kango, Jara and Hazelbeem’s boots.

Sharon looked down at the boots. “He just pushed me too far.”

“It’s fine,” Kango said in her ear as he touched her arm. “Just because you eat the occasional horrible person doesn’t prove you’re actually the monster they tried to make you into. I promise.”

“You are everything!” Jara said, then added, “That guy was asking for it. As an official Countess, I pardon you.”

“Thanks,” Sharon said, still raising her voice over the awful din. “Now we just gotta save the galaxy. Any ideas?”

They all looked at each other, then at the pair of boots on the ground, as if the boots might suddenly offer a helpful suggestion.

9.

The Vastness had somehow taken over the festival speakers all around the Superior Fun Center, and was shouting about the fact that someone had dared to steal from its all-encompassing magnificence. And that nobody escaped The Vastness! To underscore this, a flotilla of The Vastness’s Joykiller-class ships were swooping down over the surface of Salubrious IV and firing Obliteron missiles at every freestanding structure. The ground shook, the sky churned, and the Superior Fun Center and several other buildings collapsed as Kango, Sharon, and Jara ran back to the Spicy Meatball—stumbling and falling on their faces as The Vastness shrieked at top volume.

“You are everything,” said Jara, face in the dirt.

Kango flung himself into his pilot seat aboard the Spicy Meatball and tried to lift off, but the entire airspace consisted of pretty much nothing but explosions, dotted with the occasional deadly warship. Barely a few hundred yards off the ground, the Spicy Meatball was forced to go into a dive to avoid a huge chunk of burning debris. Kango and Noreen screamed in unison.

“You know,” said Horace. “I’ve heard it said that death is what makes life meaningful. In that case, I am about to create more meaning than all of the artists in history combined.”

Kango was a blur as he tried to steer through the flaming obstacle course.

At last, they reached the upper atmosphere . . . just as some terrible presence appeared directly beneath them. It was just a dark shape that blotted out their view of Salubrious IV. Sharon struggled to make out any details for a moment, and then she saw some undulating barbed tentacles, and she knew.

“No,” said Sharon. “They released the planet-eater.”

“Is that Liberty House’s last line of defense?” asked Jara, fascinated by the shape on their external viewer.

“No,” Kango said. “They made it for a party years ago. It basically just eats planets, much as its name implies. And we’re between it and The Vastness. Hold tight!”

“To what?” Sharon demanded.

The planet-eater thrashed around as it forced its way out of the atmosphere of Salubrious IV and tried to swim toward The Vastness. The planet-eater’s uncountable limbs lashed out, trying to pull everything in their path into the one enormous maw at its center. One of those huge barbed tentacles swiped within a few feet of the Spicy Meatball . . . which dodged, and nearly ran into another flotilla of Joykiller-class attack ships.

“Hall and Oates!” Sharon cursed.

“You are everything!” Jara cried out.

“Keep it down, you two,” Kango growled. “It’s hard enough trying to make evasive maneuvers between pretty much everything deadly without also having to listen to a lot of religious mumbo jumbo.”

“Oh, as if you have it all figured out,” Sharon said. “Your only religion is exhibitionism. I swear, the next time we have a plan that relies on a diversion—a contained, sensible diversion—that can be my job.”

“Sure!” Kango spun the ship on its axis to scoot past a planet-eater tentacle, then veered sharply to the left to avoid a spread of Obliteron missiles. “Because you’re such a genius at strategy, and that’s how we ended up with a stupid ultimate weapon on board!”

“I’ll have you know I am quite intelligent,” Horace protested. “And there are mere minutes before my devastation wave is launched from the galactic core. Once it begins, it will sweep the entire galaxy in no time at all!”

“Hey, I did my best,” Sharon said to Kango. “It’s not as if it was my idea to—” She stopped, because Jara was staring at her. “What?”

“You’re doing it again,” Jara said. “You’re acting as though each of you is The Vastness to the other. I wish I knew how you do that. I’m going to die soon too, and even with The Vastness close at hand, I’ll die alone and for no real reason. You are everything!”

“Listen, Jara,” Sharon said, ignoring her nausea as Kango did a series of barrel rolls to avoid explosions that came close enough to rattle her teeth. “Listen. The Vastness is only everything because it’s incredibly limited. It can’t even see all the things it’s not. It’s like a giant stupid ignorant blob of . . . wait. Wait a minute!”

“What?” Kango said. “Did you think of something super super clever?”

“Maybe,” Sharon said, praying to Hall and Oates that she was right. She ran over and pulled the stolen synchrotrix out of the strongbox, then started wiring it into Horace’s core as fast as she could. “Remember what you told me was special about this device?”

“The fact that it’s worth a lot of chits?” Kango pulled the Spicy Meatball’s nose up so fast, Sharon nearly did a backflip while keeping one hand on Horace. “It’s got a nice color scheme? It has the ability to neutralize . . . oh. Oh!”

“You are everything!” Jara said.

The planet-eater had finally gotten past all of the attack ships that had tried vainly to slow it down. Now it had reached The Vastness, opening the vast gnashing maw at the heart of its starfish-like body to try and devour the mega-planetoid. The planet-eater embraced The Vastness with its many limbs.

Sharon gripped Jara’s shoulders so hard, her knuckles were white. “Tell The Vastness we’ve got the ultimate weapon, right here on our ship. We can help The Vastness to become completely unstoppable. And The Vastness really will be everything, in an even better way than before.”

Jara looked like she was about to cry. “You want me to lie to The Vastness.”

“No,” Sharon said. “Yes. Sort of. Not really. It’s the only way.”

“I’m just moments away from a glorious consummation,” Horace said. “It’s at times like this that I feel like composing a sonnet.”

“Jara,” Sharon hissed, “now!”

“I’m trying,” Jara said, shutting her eyes and concentrating. “The Vastness doesn’t really listen. It just talks. I’m sending the message as hard as I can.”

“Now! Please!”

The Vastness reached out with a beam of energy, trying to seize the Spicy Meatball. Sharon rushed to the rear airlock with Horace, cobbled together with the synchrotrix. She tossed them out, and The Vastness’s energy field captured them, pulling them through one of The Vastness’s slavering eyemouths inside its guts.

They were inside The Vastness’s own atmosphere, close enough to hear its eyemouths shouting through their countless razor-sharp teeth. “I am everything! Now I have this ultimate weapon, my power will be absolute. I will be all things, and every living being will shout my praises. I am—”

Sharon watched through the airlock as The Vastness vanished from space.

In the space where The Vastness had been, a bright purple-and-green fissure was opened up. The crack in spacetime was huge enough to let Sharon see through it as The Vastness was drawn toward the supermassive black hole at the core of the galaxy.

“You are everything,” Jara said, sorrowfully, standing next to Sharon.

And then The Vastness was no longer visible—but in its place, there was a huge distortion enveloping the black hole at the core of the galaxy.

“The biggest Embarrassment the galaxy has ever seen,” Kango breathed from the flight deck.

And then the purple-and-green fissure closed, leaving a badly injured planet-eater, several thousand confused Joykiller-class starships, and the Spicy Meatball.

“We did it,” Kango said, seeming semi-permeable with astonishment.

“The Vastness followed Horace’s program and ended up at the galactic core,” Sharon said. “And then it Embarrassed itself.”

“I just killed my god.” Jara looked as though she was too shocked even for tears.

“Look at it this way,” Sharon said. “You told the truth. Mostly. The Vastness is everywhere and everything now, in a way. And it always will be with you. And it can never be defeated. You can worship The Vastness forever.”

“I don’t know.” Jara tried saying, “You are everything,” but it wasn’t the same when it came in response to nothing.

“Well, meanwhile,” Kango said. “We lost the synchrotrix that we were counting on to pay our bills. And we lost the super-weapon, too. So, we’re even more broke than we were before. Unless we can convince Mandre Lewis that we just saved the galaxy.”

“We’ll figure something out,” Sharon said, then turned back toward Jara. “But what are you going to do? There’s a huge fleet of ships out there, full of your fellow acolytes, and they desperately need some direction. Plus, this star system is rich in resources and technology, and it just had all its planetary defenses wrecked. You could go back to Salubrious, with all your people, and become a Countess for real.”

“Maybe,” Jara said. “Or maybe I could go with you guys? I feel like I have a lot to learn from you two. And I’m not sure I’m ready to explain what happened to the other acolytes.”

“Sure. How do you feel about helping to open a restaurant? Do you know how to make a tableclot?” Kango threw the Spicy Meatball headlong into an escape course before anybody could try to blame them for all the property damage. Behind them, the ruins of Salubrious IV sparkled with the dying light of countless fires as the tributary ships of The Vastness began, hesitantly and confusedly, to make planetfall.

©2017 by Charlie Jane Anders. Originally published in Cosmic Powers, edited by John Joseph Adams. 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.”

My Children’s Home

Woody Dismukes | 4460 words

My children do not dream and neither do I. But that does not mean our sleep is sound. Sometimes they wake in the middle of the night, eyes wide and wet, grasping for a reason they stare into the darkness. I wish I could tell them it was a nightmare, that whatever they are feeling isn’t real, but instead I tell them to close their lids and lay lightly back into sleep, which they always do. My children are good at taking orders.

When the sun rises, my children all escape from their sheets and walk to the dining hall. It is not so much a hall as it is a room. We call it a hall because that is its name. There are other homes much bigger than this where the halls could be auditoriums but they are still called halls. I don’t question the names of things.

My children eat what they always eat, eight ounces of a soupy gray porridge. It is what I eat too. It is what I have always eaten. At sundown, my children will eat another eight ounces. It tastes neither good nor bad but occasionally reminds me of my own childhood.

Today I am reminded even more of my time as a child. When I open my notebook, I see I have been sent a correspondence. There is no sender and I wonder what encryption has allowed this message to leak past the censors. It reads:

To an old friend,

I remember when life was as sweet as nectar. Hope you still carry a bit of sweetness on your tongue.

—XX

I read the correspondence over again as I take a brimming spoonful of porridge, then close my notebook and rise from the head of the table. Whomever has sent the message knows my home well, I am sure of that.

It takes my children thirteen minutes to eat their morning meal, after which the orderlies clear the plates and tableware to the kitchen. This is my favorite time of the day. The way my children’s melodic march melds with the percussion of pewter clinking against the orderlies’ iron gears sounds something like music. No song is ever the same. I wouldn’t quite call it beauty but it is something close.

The home has four classrooms, one for each cluster. I can observe each cluster from my notebook but sometimes I accompany my children to their desks anyway. They do not speak—not to me nor to each other—but it feels nice just to walk amongst them. They file directly to their assigned seats and begin their studies.

On the days I do stay amongst them, I do not stay in the classroom long. There is no place for me there. Every child is slumped head down with stylus in hand, the light blue glow of the desk reflecting off their eyes. I return to my office and my notebook to monitor for defects. I am glad that I do not serve at a larger home. Fewer children allows me more time for each. Usually, I am able to spot defects early enough so that they can be corrected. This is not a liberty many fathers have. I pride myself on my home’s record. I have never had a child recalled.

Cluster D is my oldest cohort. Nearly men but not quite. I do my best to prepare them for the Auction but I fear it is an experience one can only learn from having. I spend the rest of my day—like I spend all of my days—charting the children’s statistics in my notebook.

The day’s second meal is much like the first. The children shuffle into the dining hall and take their seats. The orderlies set the tables and bring the porridge from the kitchen. I watch the children as they eat. My eyes fall to one in particular. He is D-13, one of my highest performing children. By the Bureau’s requirements, he is the ideal child. His chest resting high between his broad shoulders. His jaw stern and hairless, lips blooming full like hibiscus petals. His skin a silky shadow. If I didn’t know his file, I might think him young enough to be in cluster C, maybe even cluster B.

Yet today there is exhaustion bruised beneath his eyelids. I note this in my notebook and finish my meal. When the children finish theirs, I release them to their free activity period. I do not accompany them for this. They deserve at least some time unobserved by me. Besides, I use this time to study the incubators.

The basement of the home is cold, made worse by the humidity. The incubators like it this way. I watch the orderlies roll through the rows of orbs, tending to each as if the child inside were already born. There are hundreds of them, each orb uncannily similar to the next. I watch the figures toss and turn in that thick blue liquid. Do they have thoughts already? Do their thoughts differ from their dreams? It saddens me that they will not all survive. I see each one as my child despite the odds. As much as the Bureau would like to believe, there is nothing in this world that is absolute. Not even science.

I leave the orderlies to their assignments and retire to my own living quarters, where I take out my notebook and open the earlier correspondence once more. The words are strange enough, though it’s the intimacy of it that startles me most. We are taught that we will never again see the others from our home after we are auctioned and so intimacy is rare. There is no need of it in professional communications. We are taught there is no need of it at all. And yet I am sure every one of my children feels some sense of it. I can see it in the eyes of those whose gaze lingers too long on another. I can see it in those whose eyes remind me of my own.

As I begin to respond my heart picks up its pace, just as I imagine my children’s do when I catch them in places they shouldn’t be. It takes me many minutes before I bring myself to send the reply, but I do send it in the end. It says:

Dear Old Friend,

Though your nectar has long since dried, there is still memory of its sweetness, as if my mouth were full of it.

—XX

• • • •

It is not often, but sometimes I become lonely. I have my children to keep me company, of course, but my parental role prevents us from calling each other friend. The orderlies are as rigid and cold as they look, incapable of any meaningful conversation beyond necessary utilitarian communication. Even this is limited. There is no command I can give by voice that can’t be done with my notebook, though sometimes I speak to them anyway, if only just to remember what conversation used to be like. Most of the time they don’t respond but roll away to carry out whatever duty they have been assigned.

Because of this I actually look forward to visits from the Bureau. I don’t need their approval for satisfaction—I know that what I do I do well—though it is still pleasant to see the reviews reflect that supposition. The Bureau doesn’t come to my home often. Other fathers who do not produce a consistent quality of clusters are visited with more frequency. Visits to my home are rarely more than a formality.

This is what I expect when I hear the doorbell ring, but when I reach my home’s foyer I find that the orderly has let in a man I have not before seen. Moreover, he is followed by a cohort of three or four men that do not have the looks of Bureau men. The leader doesn’t appear to be an unpleasant man. His rounded jowls and short neck provide him with a jolly sort of demeanor. Still, he and his cohort make me uneasy. Random variables make me anxious. I do not like data I cannot make sense of.

The man takes off his hat and reaches out to shake my hand. I do not even have to ask before he shows me his credentials. They look authentic to me, but he insists the orderly scan them anyway. Everything checks out, as I knew it would, and he assures me I’ll hardly notice the others are there.

“Would you like a tour of the home?” I ask once he has put his badge away.

The man waves his hand and straightens the lapel of his blazer in an oddly casual manner. “I’d rather get straight down to business, if we could.”

I nod with a slight bow of respect to him and his cohort and step toward the classrooms. “Of course, right this way.”

First, we make our way past the dining hall and up the stairs to cluster A. I step into the room, but the men only poke in their heads. I do not want to say the Bureau man’s rosy cheeks turn to a grimace for a smile never quite leaves his face, but I feel he somehow looks displeased. We do not stay long with cluster A, neither do we linger with clusters B nor C. However, when we enter into cluster D’s classroom, the Bureau man’s head perks with interest. I assume he will only want a cursory glance and am surprised when he motions with a swift hand for his cohort to follow as he strolls right past me through the aisles of glowing desks.

My children do not seem to notice as the men walk by, their concentration locked tightly to the desks’ exercises. The men study each individual child with a greater intensity than I scrutinize my children’s progress reports. They aren’t critiquing the children’s quality but seem as if they are looking for something. I cannot say what. The only indication I receive is the Bureau man’s stopping at the tired child, D-13. The man bends as much as his thick waist will allow and brings his face so close I am certain the child can smell his breath. He prods his hand into the child’s dense, coarse curls. D-13 raises his head and glances at the men but returns to his studies as soon as the Bureau man takes his hand away.

“What’s this one called?” the Bureau man shouts to me from across the room.

I clear my throat as I am not accustomed to speaking loudly. “D-13,” I say, though by the man’s grunt I cannot tell if he’s heard me. The men continue to stare at the child for a while longer. Long enough to make me uncomfortable.

When they do look away, they show no further interest in the other children. Briskly they pace out of the room and down the stairs without need of my guidance. I chase them to the foyer where the Bureau man puts his hat back on and the others arrange their coats over their shoulders.

“Don’t you want to look over the incubators?” I ask.

The Bureau man smiles warmly and shakes his head. “There’s no need. A father of your reputation I am certain keeps a sterile and cleanly incubation chamber.”

The Bureau man then opens the front door without waiting for the orderly to do so for him. He and his cohort do not offer so much as a goodbye, but I catch them before the Bureau man slams the door shut. “If you don’t mind me asking, what happened to the other man from the Bureau? The one they had been sending?”

The Bureau man snorts and chews at the inner flesh of his lips. “Reassigned,” he says. “I’ll be filing your reviews for the foreseeable future. But don’t you worry. If you keep up the good work, you’ll be getting excellent marks from me.”

With that, the men turn down the steps and into their carriage. They spin off quickly, shooting up dust and gravel as they soar past the green hills and into the forest beyond.

• • • •

That evening, once my children are asleep, I open my notebook to find that I have received a reply to yesterday’s correspondence. My heart flutters as I open it.

My Dear Old Friend,

How good it is to hear our tongues still share the same taste. Here there is nothing but a bitterness I hope you have been spared. Only the sweet of you has allowed me to swallow what has been forced down my throat.

—XX

I would be lying if I said I did not wonder what lies beyond the forest. There are many functions one might be auctioned to fulfill, but I have never seen any of them performed in person. In truth, I did not see myself being left behind to run the home while the others from my cohort were auctioned elsewhere. Over the years I have grown to enjoy my position—it is familiar and necessary—but for years directly after I was auctioned, I envied the world hidden from me.

Rumors reached me, of course, through various channels, though mostly through the Bureau men. The world beyond the trees has rarely been portrayed kindly and so I am glad that I have been able to live in ignorance. However, if for only a moment, my old friend’s correspondence brushes away this veil of bliss.

I wonder where he is. What that place must look like. I try to think of him in any place at all, but when I close my eyes, I can only picture how he was before the Auction. What would he look like now? Firm hands made coarse by callouses? Eyes stretched thin by squinting in the bright sun? Perhaps he was auctioned to a home much like this one and does not look to have aged a day from when we last saw each other.

I think hard about how to reply, but nothing comes before I am notified through my notebook that an orderly has found two students out of bed. I close the correspondence and reluctantly make my way toward the kitchen.

When I arrive, the orderly has a firm grip on both children’s arms, though both are too petrified to attempt escape. One is D-13 and the other is D-6. Each is unclothed from the waist down, the liminal space between their legs halfway between manhood and childhood. I command the orderly to release them and let them gather their bedclothes from the floor. It obeys and I listen to the hiss of steam as heavy gears awkwardly open its grip. Quickly the two children make themselves decent.

After I command the orderly to return to its rounds, I lead the children to my office. Their faces are a deep maroon and I can hear every heavy swallow they make as they trudge behind me. They do not wish to sit once we reach my office. Somehow they feel themselves unworthy of that allowance. Still, I insist and they do as I say.

They stew like hot porridge as I gather my thoughts from behind my mahogany desk. I try to keep my voice even and soft. I am not angry. I’m not upset either. If anything, I worry about them.

I lean forward and cross my fingers. I don’t want to appear stern but neither do I want to betray my nervousness either. “What do each of you think about the Auction?” I ask. They look at each other for the correct answer, but there is none. Their eyes return to the floor so I continue. “When I was a child I, too, forgot the father of this home had once been raised in a home just as I had. I don’t know how similar his experience was to mine, but after I was auctioned and was assigned as father, I discovered that he knew a great deal more than I gave him credit for.”

D-6 glances at D-13 though his gaze is not returned. He is lankier than D-13 and quite tall. Timid in both demeanor and appearance. I can see the bones jutting from his cheeks as his mouth twitches with anxiety. He does not want to speak but knows I won’t break the silence and neither will D-13. “Do you mean to ask if we are frightened?” he says.

I drum my fingers against the back of my hand and nod as he speaks. I try to let him know that I am receptive to his thinking. “Every single child in your cluster is afraid.”

At this, D-13 picks up his head. He is confused, though he hides it well. He purses his lips and straightens his spine to feign a defensive posture. “I’m not afraid. Fear doesn’t make a man. A man transcends fear.”

I do my best to hold back a snicker but a slight smile sneaks through. “I see you have been taking in your desk’s lessons well. But just because you can recite your lessons back to me doesn’t mean you truly believe what you say.”

This angers him but he knows better than to try me. He swallows his frustration, just as he’s been taught to. “I’m nearly a man, I know that much,” he says.

D-6 throws him a worried look—almost a warning—but D-13 doesn’t seem to see it. I unlace my hands and straighten my posture to imitate his. “That much is true,” I say. “The Auction is nearly upon you and there is much man in you. You are taught that the Auction is a rite of passage and it is. But just as there is much man in you now, there will be much child in you once you are auctioned. Your desk teaches you there is no space in between, but I’m not sure if I’ve ever let go of the child in me entirely. It can be a useful thing. Don’t rush so quickly to throw it away.”

“But how are we supposed to do that?” D-6 asks.

I turn to him and say, “Be more discreet, for one.”

D-6’s face is still as stone. My words are a thin mist. D-13 looks like he has more to say but doesn’t, so I dismiss them both. There is no point in punishing them. After they leave my home, there will be more than enough punishment to make up for it.

• • • •

Not much more than a week passes before the Bureau man returns, though this time he is alone. When I meet him in the foyer, he is patting his belly and grinning wide. He again shows me his credentials, despite my telling him again that it’s unnecessary and assuring him I remembered who he is.

After the exchange of pleasantries he says, “Where’s the child?” Less as a question, more as a statement of his authority.

“Which one?” I ask and he bellows laughter that echoes up to the rafters.

I don’t want to know which child he means, but I do. I try to feign confusion, but I can tell it is a thin façade and lead him up the stairs anyway. I hope he will stay at the entrance to the classroom, but he makes his way straight to D-13 and pulls him away from his desk. D-13 looks toward me, but I do nothing.

The Bureau man walks D-13 to the hallway. I stop outside classroom D, assuming the hallway is as far as the Bureau man will take the child, but without a word he continues to the stairs and down them. As I follow, I call after them. “Where are you taking him?”

The Bureau man does not stop. The home’s wooden steps creak loudly up into the rafters.

I race around the Bureau man and stand firmly in the way of the door. “This doesn’t make sense,” I argue. “The child’s marks are perfect. Why is he being recalled?”

The Bureau man shrugs and takes a step forward. He looks at me as he does. It is a look that tells me the child’s beauty is not lost on him.

I spread my arms as if that were to make a difference. “Who is your superior? I was not notified of this.”

D-13 isn’t looking at me or the Bureau man. He is glancing up the stairs. At the top I can see D-6 has left the classroom too, though an orderly’s iron claws are fighting to return him to his desk, steam rising from its blocky head evidence of the thing’s substantial exertion.

I take out my notebook as the Bureau man gladly provides me with his supervisor’s name. It is unnerving how easily the name slips through his lips. I establish a connection with the Bureau’s local division and ask for the name he has given me. After a brief moment I am connected with the supervisor. I inquire fervently about this strange order, but quickly my words are shot down.

“Whatever the child’s records indicate, he is being recalled,” the man on the line says. “I cannot discuss the matter further.”

I have nothing to say to this, so I ask to be transferred to someone else and I am. This person tells me the same thing, so I ask to be transferred again. The Bureau man never loses the grin from his jolly red cheeks. He seems content to wait for an eternity. He knows the outcome, it doesn’t matter how many Bureau men I speak to.

I sever the connection and scowl at the Bureau man. D-6 must have been dragged back to the classroom, since D-13 has now shifted his focus to the Bureau man. “Where are you taking me?” he asks.

“To a place where you’ll be well taken care of.”

I shiver at the Bureau man’s words. I don’t know why but my mind becomes infected by the image of my dear old friend. D-13 is scared and shivering, but he asks no more questions. In this moment, it occurs to me that maybe he has lost the child in him and that I have lost the man.

“Tell me what is wrong with the child!” I shout at him.

With one hand on the child and the other on my shoulder, the Bureau man shoves me aside and walks out the door. I want to resist but I cannot. My body is wiser than I am.

“Tell me what is wrong with him!”

I watch as tears blur the scene of the Bureau man shoving the child into the carriage and soaring away from the home.

• • • •

That night I do not accompany my children to dinner. Instead I go to the basement and spend the time with the incubators. Many of the figures do not move, but some of them kick and fight as if they are having a bad dream. I walk up to one of the orbs and peer through the glass. I am struck by the unborn child’s hands. They are almost like mine. They have knuckles and nails. Five fat little fingers, small and delicate.

If I wanted to, I could terminate every single orb in the room. Save them the pain of knowing there is nothing better. I tell myself that is not true. That there is much beauty to soothe the pain. But I can’t bring myself to believe it.

I still have not sent a reply to my dear friend’s second correspondence. What could I say to him? How could I tell him of all that has happened when I am here—still in the comfort of the home where we grew up—and he is bound by whatever life he was bought into? What more could I offer him than remembrance of a life he will never again see?

I sit down on the floor right where I am and open the correspondence in my notebook. I read it and then again and then again. I don’t know how many times I have read it since it first was sent.

I don’t stop reading it until I hear the footsteps of someone walking down into the incubation chamber. It must be a child because the sound does not roll as an orderly would. I pick my head up and see that it is D-6. Cautiously, he makes his way over to me and sits down.

For a while we sit silently in the comfort of each other’s presence. We both know there is nothing to say but for now we are okay with that. We are okay knowing someone else can feel what we feel.

It is not me who breaks the silence. It is D-6. He says, “I guess I always knew it was going to happen, but I didn’t think it would be this hard when it did.”

“It never is,” I say. “It wouldn’t have been any easier if he had stayed until the Auction.”

D-6 puts his head down. “What if we went after him?” he suggests, but looks like he can tell how insane that sounds.

“It’s not worth it,” I say.

“Why not?” he asks, even though he knows damn well why.

I try to apologize but I know the words aren’t right, so I say, “I’ve never been beyond the forest in my entire life. You at least have that much to look forward to.”

D-6 looks over as if this thought had never occurred to him. I can’t tell if my words are helpful.

I hop to my feet and extend my hand to him. “Let’s go to the hills,” I suggest. D-6 hesitates, but I grab his arm and yank him up to his feet. “Come on, let’s go.”

We go up the stairs, into the foyer, and out the door. The hills are not far, just about a ten-minute walk from the home. The sun is beginning to fade behind the trees when we reach the top of the tallest knoll. D-6 slinks down onto the grass and I do the same. We look at the trees as they rustle in the wind. It is almost as if they are dancing.

“Will I ever see him again?” he asks and I smile.

We sit until the sun is no longer visible and the sky has turned a bright auburn. I don’t want to get up and neither does he. For a moment, we can see the entire world.

©2019 by Woody Dismukes.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Woody Dismukes is a Brazilian-American poet, author, and musician living in Jackson Heights, Queens. He is a 2018 Clarion West graduate and has taught at University Settlement’s Creative Center. His work is featured in or forthcoming from Lightspeed, Apex, and elsewhere. You can find him on Twitter @WoodyDismukes.

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

Self-Storage Starts with the Heart

Maria Romasco Moore | 5990 words

You’ll notice how the commercials never mention the price. They’ve all got some lab-coated guy with chiseled cheekbones spouting dumbed-down drivel about how emotions have wavelengths, the same as light or sound, which are reflected and absorbed by the objects around us. How this discovery has the potential to revolutionize your life. Yes, you, the one glued to your screen at three a.m., binging YouTube videos of animals-you-would-not-expect-to-be-friends-becoming-friends because you are too sad and lonely to sleep. How would it feel to be free of the feelings which are weighing you down, even now?

Then an address, a website, a punny name. But never the price.

I had to actually go to one of these places, a few weeks after Christopher moved away. I had to suffer a tour through the hallways lined with tiny, ice-blue lockers, had to say “Um, yes, I’m interested in the basic loneliness storage package,” before, finally, the sales-guy slid some paperwork across the table and I was able to find, after scanning the small print, a number, at which point I nearly choked on the complimentary coffee.

Even the smallest locker cost more than half my monthly paycheck. More than the rent on my studio apartment, which has low ceilings and only one window, which I always leave open, even in January. I spend most of my time at home sitting in front of it, painting fleur-de-lis on tiny shields or bloodstains on tiny swords, listening to the scraps of passing conversation which drift up from the sidewalk below.

At the loneliness storage facility, I told the sales guy I’d need to think about it and then I hurried home to sit by that window, ashamed.

I waited for as long as I could stand and then I called Christopher. Before the new baby and the new house, he would come over to my place once a week. He’d pull lancers and Landsknechts from his briefcase, arrange them on my table of papier-mâché hills and miniature forests.

Our battles lasted hours, often stretching late into the night. When we played, everything else melted away. We were generals, kings, leaders of nations. When our eyes met across the table it was like the whole world was just the two of us.

I could have lived in that world forever.

But it had been over a month since I last saw Christopher. I’d been playing solo battles, captaining both forces, trying to pretend I didn’t know my own plans.

“You need to try some different games,” Christopher told me over the phone, “Find new people to play with.” Just the sound of his voice was enough to make me feel better.

“Or you could move back instead,” I said

“Come on, James. You could try some Warhammer, maybe. I know there’s a group that meets over at the game store on Craig sometimes.”

“Warhammer? How can you even suggest that?”

Christopher sighed loudly. “You’re impossible, James.”

Even before he moved to the suburbs, Christopher was always trying to convince me to “put myself out there.” Ask a coworker out for coffee or something, he’d say. It’s not that complicated, James. You’ve just got to try.

No matter how often I explained, he never seemed to understand that, for me, talking to a stranger was like walking onto a battlefield naked, unarmed. At the call center where I worked, we had scripts to follow, finely calibrated for success, and yet more calls than I could count ended with the other person calling me something nasty and hanging up.

If Christopher had one fault, it was his inability to recognize that things came more easily to him than they did to everyone else.

In all other ways, he was perfect.

I asked him, as I had done every day since he moved, when he would be able to come over again. He told me, as he always did, that he didn’t know. Between teaching high school and the tutoring he had picked up after hours to supplement his income and of course the baby and the distance and . . .

“What about Saturday?” I asked. “Just for an hour or two? We’ll do a skirmish.”

He said he would think about it and then the baby started crying and he had to go.

• • • •

The next morning, I called Christopher. The phone rang and rang and rang and then his voice: “This is Christopher, leave a message.” I tried to sound casual. Hey, just had something I wanted to run by you, give me a call when you can. I gave it another fifteen minutes, called again.

On the bus to work, I made frantic mental calculations. If I turned the thermostat to fifty, if I sold the bed and slept on the floor, if I stopped buying salsa to go with my rice and beans, then maybe, maybe, I could afford to store my loneliness.

When I got home, I called Christopher again, but there was still no answer. I called him a few more times just to hear his voice on the answering machine.

That night I lay awake, picturing Christopher and his wife in their big suburban bedroom, curled up, no doubt, beneath a downy comforter, arms wrapped around each other, skin against skin, and my stomach twisted.

Christopher was actually the whole reason I got into historical miniature gaming in the first place. My freshman year, we were in European Civilization Before 1600 together and he mentioned after class once that it was his hobby and I had said, “Wow, what a coincidence, me too,” and then I rushed back to my dorm to google it and learn everything I could.

Back then, I couldn’t afford more than a few miniature soldiers. So I used what I had. I made scenery out of egg cartons and takeout containers. I swelled my ranks with roughly whittled baby carrots glued to pennies. When they were killed in battle, they doubled as a snack.

So, sure, I couldn’t afford the fees to store my loneliness. But maybe that wasn’t the only way.

• • • •

Every night for the next week, I stayed up late researching online. When the weekend came, I went to Pitt Library and scoured the latest scientific trade journals. When we were students, Christopher and I frequently came to the library to study accounts of ancient battles, occasionally for a class, but more often so that we could transport ourselves into them later, hunched over the tiny card table in my room together, sitting close enough that our knees sometimes touched.

I kept calling Christopher. I reached him once, but he said he didn’t have time to talk and that he would call me later.

He didn’t. Maybe the baby had a cold.

Monday evening, I walked to the international market and the CVS and returned home with an eclectic collection of herbs, spices, cleaning supplies, and over-the-counter medications, all of which I boiled down into a pungent, syrupy liquid which burned my nostrils and made my head swim.

Tuesday, I caught a bus to Walmart and purchased a dust-resistant, self-sealing plastic bin with lock-it-tight ™ tabs. Back home, I walked through my apartment and brushed my hand across each item I owned. At the storage center, there was a sensor you could rent to help identify which objects in your home were most imbued with the emotion you hoped to eliminate, but I had to go by feel. Apparently, items absorb emotions at variable rates. This has less to do with their actual physical properties, and more to do with our own subconscious perceptions of them. Which is to say, it’s really just us, people, shoving all these emotions into things without realizing it or being able to control it.

In the end, I selected a single gray sock, the mate of which had long ago gone missing; a stack of flattened cardboard cartons, each of which had once contained a Celeste’s Four Cheese Frozen Gourmet Pizza For One; and a sheaf of smudged scoresheets from the battles I had fought against myself since Christopher left.

I placed them in the bin and did a quick visualization exercise in which I imagined every last scrap of my loneliness flowing into them. If I threw them all away, my research indicated, I might feel better for a little while, but the emotions would inevitably flow back into me. So instead I drenched the whole lot with the deactivator liquid from the night before, sealed the bin, and stuck it in the freezer.

Exhausted by the whole process, I nuked some rice and beans, slumped into the chair by the window, and applied Badab Black wash to the bodies of fifteen-millimeter arquebusiers until my eyelids grew heavy.

As I climbed into my twin bed and wrapped myself up tight in the scratchy sheet, I felt a lightness the likes of which I had not felt in ages. It was as if I’d been lugging around a backpack full of lead shot every day and night for years without pause and had only, just now, thought to set it down.

• • • •

When I woke up, however, I felt like shit. It took twice as long as usual to drag myself out of bed and over to the kitchen section of my studio. When I opened the fridge to get milk, I was hit with a wave of emptiness so strong I almost cried.

I stood there as the cold billowed out at me. I stared at the bag of wilted baby spinach, the stacked Styrofoam boxes, and my bones echoed up and down with the hollow round sound of it. Loneliness.

It had leaked.

It was almost worse now that I knew how good it felt to be free of it. I dumped the contents of the lock-it-tight ™ (yeah, right) bin onto the counter, slapped on some pants, and caught a bus back to Walmart before work to return it. As the customer service desk attendant handed me a receipt, her hand brushed against mine and I flinched away, the touch like an electric shock, so unfamiliar that it was almost painful.

That evening I spent nearly an hour on a bus to the Wilderness Outfitters by the highway. I lingered in the camping aisle before settling on a small cooler which, with rotomolded construction and permafrost insulation, claimed to be watertight, airtight, and one hundred percent grizzly proof.

At home, I transferred the former contents of the bin. I whipped up a new batch of the syrupy deactivator liquid. Once the cooler was in the freezer, I sealed the seam of the door with duct tape. After that, I kept checking. I’d get up from my chair by the window and walk past the fridge, gauge my state of mind, go stand in the opposite corner as far from the fridge as I could, gauge it again. It got so I was no longer sure how I felt about anything. I called Christopher, got his machine, called again. I knew I should stop, knew his phone would show him how often I was calling. I should ration my calls like they were water and the days were a desert.

But there was no one else, so I called him again ten minutes later. And then again ten minutes after that.

I fell asleep eventually, my pillow stuffed into the corner of the window, the voices of strangers from the sidewalk below loud enough that they could almost have been in the room.

• • • •

The next morning, I felt fine. More than fine. I woke early, pulled on pants, mixed up some instant coffee, and went outside, where I sat on the front steps of my building and watched the morning birds flicker through the trees.

I hadn’t been there long when my across-the-hall neighbor Emil appeared, coming up the street from the bus stop. We’d only spoken once, when he’d knocked on my door to ask if I knew the number for maintenance. He was an older guy, maybe fifty or something, with an accent I couldn’t place.

“Emil!” I exclaimed as he approached the steps, which seemed to startle him enormously.

“Good morning,” he said.

“It is!” I said. “Very good!”

“Yes,” said Emil.

“I’m not lonely anymore,” I told him. Normally I wouldn’t have dreamed of telling such a thing to a near stranger. Normally I would never have spoken to him at all. But this morning I wanted to tell someone about my good fortune, so I simply did.

“Ah,” said Emil. He shifted from foot to foot on the sidewalk.

“I got rid of it. Loneliness. It’s gone. I put it into storage.”

“Yes, very well, congratulations.” Emil bobbed his head at me and then, eyes down, began to climb the stairs. There was something terribly familiar about the way his shoulders rolled inward, as if he were slowly collapsing. The way he had barely met my eyes the whole time we spoke.

“Emil,” I said, “Are you lonely?”

He stopped. We were only a few feet apart. If I’d put out my arm I could have touched him.

“Lonely?”

• • • •

Half an hour later, I was standing in his apartment, a mirror image of my own, helping him select the correct items to put into the vault. I had decided to call it “the vault” because that sounded better than “the cooler inside my duct-taped freezer” and I wanted Emil to think I was serious about all this.

He pulled a photograph from a small black album. It was him and a short woman in a white dress. The colors had that brassy seventies look to them. Emil had much more hair. The woman was smiling.

“My wife,” he said, “I miss her very much.”

“Oh,” I said. “Sorry. I can’t do grief.”

Emil gave me a strange look. “Grief?”

“Yeah, I know they seem related, but loss, bereavement, mourning—all that stuff is another category.”

“My wife is not dead.”

“Oh.”

“She just changed her mind.”

“Oh, well, that’s fine, then.”

Emil handed me the photograph.

“Why can’t you do grief?” he asked.

“It’s got different storage requirements.” I’d gleaned some basics from my research. Grief needed to be submerged and well-oxygenated. Anger needed to be kept warm, though it was also highly flammable. Fear and desire required some complex combination of pressure and electric currents.

“Very well,” said Emil.

• • • •

I left Emil’s with a plastic bag full of personal effects. I’d debated whether I ought to take the bus back to the Outfitters and buy another cooler, but the agreement with Emil was that he wasn’t going to pay me until he was sure the procedure had worked.

Besides, the plastic bag was making me uneasy. I’d had Emil do the whole visualization exercise and it seemed to have worked. I felt a vague loneliness, but there was something off about it, like a coat that doesn’t quite fit.

So I whipped up another batch of the liquid stuff, ripped the duct tape off the freezer and gingerly extracted the cooler. I held my breath as I prized the lid free, though I knew this was pointless. I tossed Emil’s things into the cooler, poured the liquid, latched the lid, slammed the freezer door. And then I fell to my knees and buried my face in my hands.

I spent the next five minutes or so curled up on the floor in front of the refrigerator. My lungs ached. My eyes burned with tears. This will pass, I told myself, this will pass. You are alone and no one loves you and no one will ever love you or even like you, really, but this feeling will pass.

Instinctually, I found myself reaching for my phone, dialing Christopher’s number. I stopped myself before I hit call. The feeling was passing. It was funny, though—I realized that I’d barely thought about Christopher at all today.

That was unusual. I had this habit of talking to him, even when he wasn’t there. Not out loud—I wasn’t insane—but in my head. Christopher, what do you think I should I have for dinner; well, James, perhaps a bowl of rice and beans; but, Christopher, I had that yesterday; well, perhaps add an extra splash of hot sauce to it this time, live life on the edge.

I did this often. Did it every day. As if Christopher were simply a part of me. Maybe that was pitiful, I don’t know. Maybe less lonely people didn’t do that. I hadn’t done it even once so far today. Hadn’t even realized what was missing.

• • • •

The next morning, I was woken by knocking. Groggy and with hastily-donned robe askew, I shuffled to the front door and opened it to find Emil standing outside.

“How does it work?” he demanded.

“What?”

“Is it a machine? Where do you keep it?” Emil was peering around me, trying to see into my apartment.

“Oh,” I said, “There isn’t much to look at. It’s mostly down to, you know, chemicals and stuff. Very specialized. You don’t want to mess with it. Best left to experts.”

“And you,” said Emil, “you are an expert?”

“Sure,” I said weakly. Emil gave me an appraising look.

“Look,” I said, “do you want your stuff back? If you just hold on a second, I’ll get it. Like I said, no payment necessary if you’re not one hundred percent satisfied with the results.”

“Ha,” said Emil, “Not satisfied? No, no, that is not it. Not it at all.”

• • • •

Emil said it was a miracle. The men in the labs at Carnegie Mellon where he works spend all their time fooling around with test tubes and fruit fly colonies and they get paid the big bucks and yet who would have guessed that there was better science being done right here, in the apartment across the hall.

“Oh, wow, wait,” I said, “you’re a scientist?”

“No, night janitor.”

I’d invited Emil in, offered him some coffee. It came easy, somehow, now. No one else had ever been in my apartment before except plumbers and Christopher.

“So this is your business?” Emil asked.

“Well, yes, I guess. I mean, I’m only just starting.”

Emil eyed my taped-up freezer. “I did not believe you,” he said. “The other day. I did not think anything would happen. But I thought to myself: Emil, what do you have to lose?”

“Only your loneliness,” I suggested.

“You know,” he said, “that could work as a slogan.”

“Yeah, I guess it could.”

“Tell me again, what is it that I owe you?”

“I was thinking ten dollars a week. Or thirty for a month. I’m trying to keep the cost low, you know, for people who can’t usually afford storage.”

“You have a vision. I admire that. But you must be practical. You are, if you will excuse me saying so, quite young.”

“I’m not that young,” I protested, though it was true most people assumed I was still in college. Christopher had often told me I should invest in clothes that weren’t t-shirts and jeans and also get my hair cut more often, but it seemed like a waste of money.

Emil was telling me how he had, in fact, always dreamed of running his own business. How he had tried several times before. An arcade with a high school friend, a restaurant with his brother. Neither had gotten far off the ground, but he understood now where he had gone wrong. He explained it all to me, throwing around words like expenditure and profit margin.

“And that,” he finished, confidently “is why it would unquestionably be best practices for us to become partners in this venture.” He reached across the table and shook my hand. I didn’t even flinch.

• • • •

People treated me differently all of sudden, out in the world. When I was lonely, people had avoided looking directly at me, had stepped around me on the sidewalk. They must have been able to sense it, somehow, clinging to my skin like the smell of cigarettes clings to the skin of smokers.

I could meet the eyes of cashiers easily, now. Could hold up my end of meaningless chit-chat at the bus stop. The idea of showing up to a game group full of strangers held no terror.

No appeal, either.

I could have made new friends, I suppose, but I didn’t feel much need.

My free time was spent growing the business. Emil and I hung flyers on phone poles, and by the end of the first week, we had ten clients. By the end of the second, we had thirty. We met with each client individually, in Emil’s living room. I talked them through their visualization process and then he gave them the papers to sign while I hurried across the hall to do the actual storage.

Emil had bankrolled, personally, the purchase of a large chest freezer for my apartment. He had also purloined, from the labs he cleaned, a Bunsen burner and an assortment of flasks to help streamline the liquid-brewing process. He said as long as he returned them eventually, no one would know.

At the start of the third week, Emil insisted that we must tap into new markets, diversify our portfolio, so I made an order and a few days later, the lockboxes arrived: unbreakable and dust proof, fire resistant up to two thousand degrees, watertight, made of ultra-high impact structural copolymer, with neoprene O-rings, ABS latches, and automatic purge valves.

Emil, meanwhile, got the idea to use these radiant heating pad things like the ones they used in the lab to warm the rat cages. Those he wouldn’t borrow (he couldn’t bear the rats to be cold) so we made a trip to Alan’s Pets N Plants and bought our own. We put one heating pad under each lockbox and just like that, we were ready to relieve our customers of their rage.

At the same time, we kept an eye out on craigslist for old fish tanks which we could snap up for cheap and outfit with a multitude of pumice stones connected by airline tubing to small pumps, also from Alan’s. That was grief taken care of.

I was plugging power strips into power strips by then. My electricity bill had doubled, but it didn’t matter, because we were turning a profit. That’s how Emil described it. I liked the sound of it, like turning over a new leaf.

• • • •

As I was leaving the call center one afternoon, I saw that I had a text from Christopher. He’d been in the city for a work thing, but it let out early and he was going to swing by my apartment so we could catch up, maybe fit in a quick skirmish.

I felt strange reading it. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say I felt very little. Just a few short weeks before, I knew, this text would have sent me into near paroxysms of joy, of relief. I would have rushed home, floating on air. Would have cleaned my apartment in a frenzy. Christopher was coming. My enemy general. My one true friend.

But now I felt, at best, a slight surprise.

I hadn’t even told him. About any of it. I hadn’t spoken to him at all. Oh sure, I’d called once or twice. But there had been no answer and I hadn’t left a message.

He was there when I got off the bus, sitting on the front steps of my building.

“Wow,” he said when I walked over, “You look good, man.”

My stomach didn’t flip, my heart didn’t leap. “Thanks,” I said.

Christopher complained about the mandatory training session he’d just sat through as we walked up the two flights to my apartment. When I opened the door, Christopher followed me in and then froze, eyes darting around the room.

“Is that full of bodies?” he asked, meaning, I presumed, the industrial sized freezer, which took up a solid eighth or so of the former floor space.

“It’s storage,” I told him.

“Storage?”

“I wanted to tell you about it,” I said, “but I couldn’t reach you.”

“Yeah,” he said, “Sorry. With the baby and all, well, you know . . .” He waved a hand vaguely, then knelt next to one of the many aquariums, peered into it. It held a small stuffed rabbit, purple fur rippling in the current.

“The tanks are for grief,” I said. “Like the commercials, you know? It’s the same idea as those big facilities. But smaller.”

“Jesus, James.” He looked up at me with a pained expression. “You have this much?”

I laughed. “No, that’s for customers. Me and Emil, he’s my business partner, we’ve got nearly fifty customers now. New inquiries every day.”

Christopher glanced over at the war table. Well, the former war table. There were now fish tanks where there had once been forests. Lockboxes in place of fields.

“That’s terrible,” he said quietly.

“What?” I had thought he’d be impressed. Here I was, finally doing something with my life. Putting myself out there.

“You’re charging people for this?”

“Well, yeah, but a million times less than the big places.”

“This is absurd,” he said. “This isn’t like you.”

“Look,” I said, “maybe you don’t understand how it works. I could show you how the process—”

“No,” he said. “No, the whole idea is terrible. You can’t lock things away and pretend they don’t exist.”

“Well,” I said, “you can.”

Christopher just shook his head. I wasn’t prepared for this.

When he had decided to move out of the city, I hadn’t—well, I hadn’t snuck over in the night and popped the tires on the U-Haul. I hadn’t sent his wife an anonymous message claiming to be Christopher’s secret first wife. I hadn’t called CPS to report that they were using the baby as a garden decoration. That they’d put a little gnome hat on it, had left it propped up against a rock in the back garden for hours.

I’d thought of all that, sure. But I hadn’t done it. I’d bit my tongue. I’d let him go. I’d let him be torn away from me by his wife, his baby, his stupid house in the stupid suburbs.

“You’ve probably never even been lonely,” I said to him.

“Come on. Of course I have.”

“You’ve always had friends,” I said, “Tons of them. I didn’t have any until I met you. Not even one.”

“James,” he said. “I realize that it’s hard for you to talk to people, but you never even try.”

“You don’t understand.”

He pushed himself up from the floor, walked over to the table. He picked up a slightly crushed miniature tree, which I had made myself, years ago, out of wire and a worn-out pot scrubber.

“You know,” he said, “I’ve been dabbling in the Infinity system lately. It’s pretty decent. And it’s way easier to find people to play with.”

“Infinity? But that’s sci-fi.”

Christopher sighed.

“Look,” he said, setting the tree back down. “I’ve got to admit, when you stopped calling me every day, I was relieved. But mostly I was hopeful. I figured you’d finally found some new people to talk to. I mean, don’t take this the wrong way, but sometimes when I’d hear my phone ring, I just couldn’t bring myself to pick it up. It was getting to be too much.”

I felt like I’d been slapped. “Too much?”

“A person needs more than a single friend, James. It’s too much to ask of one person to be your entire support system.”

“Fine,” I said. My cheeks were getting hot. My eyes prickling. “If it’s such a burden, then you can just stop. It’s not like you’ve been much of a friend lately anyway.”

Christopher shook his head. “You need to grow up,” he said. He grabbed his coat off the chair where’d he draped it.

I wanted to shout something pithy and final after him as he left, but my thoughts had turned to one big wordless roar. I sank down into the chair by the window (closed, now) and put my forehead against the glass. I was overcome, but not with loneliness.

It was difficult, in the moment, to untangle exactly what emotions I was experiencing. I tried grief first, since I certainly felt like crying. I grabbed some things that reminded me of Christopher—a half-painted Lancer he’d left here accidentally a few months ago, a bottle of gold paint he’d bought me for Christmas, an overdue payment notice from my phone provider—and dumped them in an empty five-gallon aquarium. I filled the tank up with half water, half deactivator, connected a handful of pumice stones to an air pump, plugged the pump into a power strip.

But it wasn’t enough. How dare he come in here all high and mighty, telling me everything I had achieved was terrible? How dare he just sit there and not pick up the phone for weeks? How dare he care less about me than I cared about him?

And Infinity, really?

So I gathered some more items—that tree he’d picked up, most of my painted soldiers—and threw them in a lockbox. I had one unused heating pad left. I laid it on the floor beneath the box, plugged it in.

Even with my anger gone, I still felt terrible. We weren’t offering it to clients yet, but Emil and I had been tinkering with a pressure cooker and some exposed wires in the hopes of branching out to fear. I pulled a shoebox out from under my bed which contained faded scraps of paper: notes Christopher had passed me in class when we were students. I tossed them in the pressure cooker, plugged it in.

But it wasn’t enough. Loneliness, Greif, Anger, Fear. None of it was enough.

Which left only desire.

I had no choice, now, but to confront what I had always known, but been afraid to look at too closely. I loved Christopher, had loved him for years, but he would never and could never love me back.

I had to let that go, too. Had to tear out my heart.

Emil and I had also bought a vacuum sealer pump meant for storing clothes and a barrel with a valve. It was even more untested than the pressure cooker, but what choice did I have? I tossed my phone into the barrel, hooked the hose of the vacuum sealer up to the valve, plugged it into the last available socket of the last available power strip.

There was a little pop and the room went dark.

I ran to the light switch, jiggled it up and down. No good. I ran around the room, unplugging everything I could. It made no difference. I ran to the window, opened it up, but already I could feel it starting, like a light breeze on the back of my neck.

I ran to my front door, threw it open. A woman who I’d passed a few times in the hall was poking her head out of the apartment next to mine.

“Hey,” she said, “Did your power just go out?”

“Yes,” I said, and then bit my tongue so hard it bled in order to stifle a scream of fury. I would show them all what it meant to be sorry.

I wasn’t sure who I would show exactly, but whoever they were I would definitely show them. Those bastards. How dare they. How very dare they do whatever it is they did to me.

“I was thinking of going down to the basement to see if there’s a fuse box or something,” said the woman.

“Let me come with you,” I said, pleading, suddenly close to tears. “Please.”

“Sure,” said the woman. She sniffed. Made a face. “Is something burning?”

And it hit me hard, then, all of it, all at once. My heart pumped bullets. My throat was scorched earth. There was something boiling up inside me. Something trying to force its way out through my flesh like a cannonball, like a bomb. My body was at war but the enemy was emptiness. The enemy was everything. The enemy was me.

“Ueergh,” I said.

The woman sniffed again and then closed her eyes, put her hands to her chest, bent over a little as if she’d been punched in the stomach. When she opened her eyes again there were tears in them.

“Fuck you,” she cried, and fled down the hall.

Across from me, Emil’s door banged open.

“So it is happening to you, too,” he said when he saw me, “you miserable piece of shit. I thought it was only me. We must have blown the fuses.”

I let out a strangled sob.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s okay. This is all your fault. Everyone will despise you for the rest of your life. You will die alone and in terrible pain. But it is not real. Do not listen to what I say. I do not mean it. These things you feel, they are not even yours.”

“Make it stop,” I said.

“I don’t know how.”

I put my hands to my own throat and tried to squeeze. I banged my forehead against the doorframe. Everyone I had ever known or cared about was definitely dead. And I missed them so much and I hated them so much. But at the same time I felt sure that I had never known or cared about a single person in all my life.

“It will pass,” said Emil. He reached for my arm, but I slapped his hand away. “It will pass.”

I closed my eyes. Took a few ragged breaths. I did not believe him. He didn’t care about me. How could he? How could anyone?

But he was right.

The feelings were already beginning to leave me, slowly at first, agonizingly slow, each fragment of pain floating off to find, I supposed, its original place in the world.

“Perhaps,” said Emil, “this was not so solid a business plan as I thought.”

The feelings were falling away faster now, streaming through me.

“People are going to want refunds,” I choked out.

Emil sagged against his doorframe, moaning softly.

I glanced behind me into my apartment, where nearly every surface was covered with boxes and aquariums and tangled cords. All that suffering.

And I thought of Christopher. This wasn’t like me, he’d said. Well, maybe it wasn’t. I’d been a better person without my loneliness. I’d started a whole damn business. I hadn’t cared what anyone thought.

Hadn’t cared about anyone.

“Emil,” I said, slowly, gritting my teeth, “would you like to, maybe, I guess, go get a cup of coffee or something?”

He frowned at me and I was sure he would laugh, then, or swear at me. In all the time we’d spent together over the last few weeks, we’d never spoken about anything but business. I barely knew him, really. He barely knew me. It was stupid of me to ask him. I was an idiot.

Without Christopher, I was nothing. Without Christopher, I was entirely alone.

The last scraps of grief and anger fell away in a rush, leaving me weak and empty and raw. Emil reached out once more and grabbed my arm just as I was about to fall.

“Sure,” he said, voice hoarse, “Coffee. Okay.”

And then my own, humble loneliness found me and settled around my shoulders like an old winter coat. And it was almost a comfort, then. Familiar, at any rate. Not as heavy as I remembered, after all.

©2019 by Maria Romasco Moore.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Maria Romasco-Moore is the author of Ghostographs, an interconnected collection of flash fiction inspired by vintage photographs. Her first novel, Some Kind of Animal, is forthcoming in 2020. She currently lives in Columbus, OH, and teaches writing at Columbus College of Art and Design. Find out more at mariaromascomoore.com

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

Ambitious Boys Like You

Richard Kadrey | 7395 words

Sonny, his cousin, was from Houston, but being from the city wasn’t why Witt found him interesting. It was that while Witt believed in everything—God, the Devil, spooks, not spilling salt without throwing some over your shoulder—Sonny believed in absolutely nothing. Not 9/11 or the Kennedy assassination, not heaven or hell. The way he talked, Witt sometimes wondered if Sonny believed in him.

“Those are dolls, you psycho hillbilly.”

“They don’t look it at night,” said Witt. “At night it looks like a whole cemetery in those trees.”

Sonny had to give him that. There were at least a hundred small dolls nailed to the apple trees around the old man’s yard. There were even a few on the porch and the low picket fence that surrounded the property.

“It’s called hoarding,” said Sonny. “These old assholes, their dog or their wife dies and their brains turn to Swiss cheese. They can’t let go of anything. That’s why we’re here, right?”

Witt nodded.

“I know. I’m just all of a sudden amused that after all these years, I’ll finally see inside the place for real. You know, we wouldn’t ride our bikes by here at night. We’d go clear around the block to avoid it.”

“What a great story. Promise me you’ll write a memoir. You ready to go?”

“Hell yeah,” said Witt, trying to sound more ready than he was.

It was just after two a.m. Witt had set the interior light on the Malibu to not come on when they opened the doors. Sonny carried the bag with their tools. They wore sneakers and latex gloves from the Walmart by the freeway. Sonny pulled on his ski mask. Witt kept his in his windbreaker’s pocket. The night was hot and humid, and the mask had itched like a son of a bitch when he tried it on in the store. He’d put it on once they got inside.

Sonny was the first through the picket fence. He held the gate open for Witt, not because he was polite, but because he didn’t want it to slam shut. That’s the other thing Witt liked about Sonny. He was a thinker.

It was only about thirty feet from the fence to the porch, and even though it was night and he was wearing a mask, Sonny kept his head down. Witt followed him, covering the side of his face with his hand. Witt stepped onto the front porch gently. He didn’t want the old boards to squeak. Sonny turned and looked at him.

“Where’s your fucking mask?”

“In my pocket.”

“Put it on.”

“There’s no one here.”

“What if he has automatic lights or security cameras?”

“Cameras? You think this old son of a bitch is James Bond?”

Sonny sighed.

“Just put the damned mask on.”

While Sonny got out his lock pick tools, Witt took the mask from his pocket and pulled it down over his face. He was sweating and itching in seconds. There better be something inside worth stealing, he thought. Gold coins or silver candlesticks or a goddamn treasure map from back when the hovel had been the nicest house in town, eighty some odd years ago. The old man had lived there by himself for as long as Witt could remember. No one had ever seen him take anything but the trash out, and even that was a rare thing. Witt hoped it was cash inside. He wasn’t a pirate. He wouldn’t know what the hell to do with a bunch of gold. When it was over, maybe he could buy his dad’s Malibu and get it fixed up. That would be sweet. He was about to ask Sonny what he thought about the idea when Sonny said, “Well, damn.”

“What?”

“You were right. The old man isn’t exactly security-minded.”

Sonny put the picks back in the bag and turned the knob on the door. It opened.

“The hayseed doesn’t even lock the place.”

“I told you,” said Witt. “Folks don’t like it here. There’s no reason they’d want to go inside.”

“But we’re not just folks, are we?”

Witt smiled. Sonny reached up and pulled down a doll held with wire over the doorframe. He handed it to Witt. The doll was about eight inches long. Its body was straw, and the head was made of rough, untanned leather, with button eyes.

“Toss it,” said Sonny. “Time to grow up. This is no cemetery. It’s a flophouse.”

Witt threw the doll into the yard, and it felt like a hundred pounds of bullshit lifted off his back. He’d been afraid of the house for so long, he took it for granted that he’d be spooked forever. And now he wasn’t. The old wreck, with its rotten gables and broken windows covered with cardboard, wasn’t Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors. It was just a prison for a pathetic old man. Witt all of a sudden sort of felt kind of sorry for him, but sorry didn’t mean that he and Sonny weren’t down for business.

Sonny pushed the front door open and Witt followed him inside.

The stink hit Witt hard, an overpowering combination of mildew, spoiled meat, and something like copper, with a sour sting that brought tears to his eyes.

“Jesus. Does this old fuck ever flush his toilet?” said Sonny.

“Sometimes in these old places, rats or raccoons will get in the walls and die there.”

“Smells like it was Noah’s whole goddamn ark.”

Sonny flicked on a small LED flashlight and Witt did the same as they went deeper into the place.

They were in a wide foyer. The floor was covered with a carpet turned black with grime and mold. To the left was a parlor. Wallpaper peeled from the walls like burned skin. To the right was a dining room. A hallway led off from the foyer. A door to the kitchen in the distance. A closet. Another door under the stairs that Witt thought led to a basement. The place was even worse than he imagined.

“You sure there’s anything left in here worth taking?” he said. “I mean, it smells like the damned dump.”

“Spend a lot of time out there, do you?” said Sonny. “You said the family were bankers. People like that, they know what to squirrel away for a rainy day.”

“I suppose.”

“Damn right you do. Now, let’s get to work. Don’t forget what I told you. Slow and steady wins the race. Take your time, but don’t get lazy. Don’t make noise, but don’t go so fast you’re going to miss valuables.”

Witt nodded. He wanted to breathe through his mouth, but he didn’t want to look like a pussy in front of Sonny. He swung his light into the parlor.

“As good a place to start as any,” Sonny said, and they went inside.

They went to opposite ends of the room. The plan was to work their way in and meet in the middle. It sounded good when they’d talked it over, but now Witt wasn’t so sure. What the hell was he looking for, exactly? He was sure they weren’t going to find a pile of hundreds just lying around the place.

He looked at the dusty paintings. Generations of the old man’s family, each more mean and joyless than the last. It eased Witt’s conscience a little.

Witt checked the bookcase and drawers on rickety old end tables. Picking up some old books, he wondered if they were worth something. Or one of the lamps. His grandma had an old gilt lamp from France that she swore was worth more than his granddad’s soul. Witt shook his head. No. They weren’t there for lamps or shit like that. He checked around the cushions on a sofa that kicked up enough dust that it looked like a west Texas sandstorm.

“What are you doing?” said Sonny.

“Searching. What do you think?”

“What are you looking for, bus fare? Leave the sofa alone.”

Sonny played his light over the room. Witt checked his watch. They’d been in the room for fifteen minutes, but it felt like an hour. I might not be cut out for this life, he thought, but he kept his mouth shut.

Sonny pursed his lips like he was going to spit.

“There’s nothing in here. Let’s check the dining room.”

They went across the hall and inspected the room the same way they’d done the other. The dining room was even less interesting than the parlor. Just a big table, some chairs, and a sideboard. There was a crystal chandelier in the center of the room, covered in cobwebs. That was probably worth something, thought Witt, but how would they get it out of there?

“Nice.”

It was Sonny’s voice. Witt went and looked over his shoulder. He had one of the sideboard drawers open and was holding up a shiny butter knife. Sonny handed it to Witt.

“You know what that is?”

Witt shook his head.

“Gold-plated silver. Old, too.”

Witt turned the knife over. It was pretty, and it reflected a buttery light onto his jacket where the flashlight caught it. It was nice, but it didn’t seem like a fortune.

“Is this what we came for?” he asked.

Sonny took the knife back and shook his head.

“It’s a start. We’ve got a few thousand dollars here easy. I know people who love this kind of shit. They sell it to antique dealers and designer fags for a fortune.”

Sonny put the knife back in the drawer.

“Aren’t we going to take it?” said Witt.

“It’s heavy. We’ll get it on the way out. But this is exactly what we’re looking for right now. Smalls. The old man will know where the big ticket stuff is, but for now remember to keep your eyes out for cash or watches or rings. We’ll finish down here and go upstairs to roust Granddad.”

A few thousand dollars already, thought Witt. Maybe I am cut out for this after all.

Sonny went ahead down the hall, and Witt followed him inside an office. There was a heavy wooden desk with an old-fashioned typewriter on top. To the side, an office chair with bad springs. It sat low and leaned back at a funny angle. There was a hat rack with a moldy fedora and ancient lacquered file cabinets so swollen with moisture that some of the drawers were twisted and wedged tight. Sonny started to work on them while Witt looked through the desk.

It was one of those old kind you see in movies, with lots of cubbyholes on top. He shone his light in each one and stuck a finger in the holes where he saw something. All he found were a few dead roaches, some rusted paper clips, and mouse turds. The drawers weren’t any better. Letterhead stationery, old pens, and a rusty letter opener. In one of the bottom drawers he found a dusty bottle of bourbon. He was tempted to take it until he saw that the seal had been broken. Did whiskey go bad like beer? He didn’t want to take a chance, so he put the bottle back and opened the top middle drawer.

There was a doll inside, like the ones in the trees. A goddamn funny place for one, Witt thought. He reached in the drawer and picked it up. It hung for a second, like it was caught on a nail, but it came free with a little tug.

Something black boiled out from the drawer and spread across the desktop, up the walls, and down onto the floor. Witt almost shouted, but kept himself under control. Some of what writhed on the desk hopped off and landed on the legs of his jeans. He pointed his light down.

There were spiders, pouring out of the desk and trying to crawl up his legs.

“Fuck!” he yelled, and shook his legs like he was barefoot dancing on coals. Someone grabbed his jacket collar and pulled him into the hall.

Sonny turned him around and looked him over.

“Spiders,” whispered Witt.

Without missing a beat, Sonny bent and brushed the spiders away with his sleeve. When they hit the floor, he stepped on them like it wasn’t anything at all.

“Thanks,” said Witt. “I’m scared shitless of those things.”

Sonny slapped him across the face.

“Don’t you make another goddamn noise, you hear me?” he said.

Witt was still trying to catch his breath. His cheek stung, but he nodded. Sonny walked over and closed the office door. Seeing the spiders locked inside, Witt relaxed a little.

“You got a thing about those bugs?” asked Sonny.

Witt nodded.

“So did my old man. Turned to jelly at the sight of ’em. That’s okay. You just better hope the old man didn’t hear you and call the cops.”

“Maybe we should leave?” asked Witt.

Sonny shook his head. Stood quiet for a minute, listening for footsteps or a phone.

“No. We’re just getting started,” Sonny said.

Witt looked around.

“This place is huge,” he said. “It could take all night.”

“No. When you’ve got a big place like this, what you do is hurt somebody. In this case, the old man.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s obviously crazy, and we’re going to want him back on planet Earth for a while. Don’t sweat it. I’ll handle things. You just watch and learn.”

Witt waited while Sonny walked down the hall. He wasn’t sure how he felt about what Sonny wanted to do. Witt had been in plenty of fights over the years, but they were always stand-up, man-to-man things, not slapping an old cuss around. Still, the gold up front was awfully pretty, and he didn’t think Sonny was the kind of man who was going to be talked out of a plan once he’d set his mind to it. Witt knuckled his cheek where Sonny slapped him. Better the old man getting hurt than him.

He realized that he was still holding the doll. It was like the others. A few inches long and with a leather head. There was a piece of string around its waist, trailing off to a frayed end. Witt remembered the feeling of the doll getting snagged on something in the drawer. Then he thought of something else.

Sonny was halfway down the hall, headed for the kitchen. Witt came up behind him and grabbed his shoulder.

“I think it was a trick,” he said.

“What?”

“The spiders. Look.” He held up the doll so Sonny could see the string. “They could have been in a bag or a net or something, and when I picked up the doll it let ’em loose.”

Sonny looked at him and a smile crept across his face.

“Be cool, man. You’re just spooked. We’re about done down here. We’ve got the kitchen and if there’s a basement, maybe give the downstairs a quick once-over. Then we go upstairs and we’re out. Okay?”

Witt wanted to agree. He didn’t want Sonny mad at him, but he didn’t want spiders even more.

“I still think it was a trick,” he said. “Something the old man set up.”

Sonny glanced upstairs.

“I doubt this old guy can find his way down to the shitter. Stay focused and do the job.”

Sonny started away and Witt wanted to say something, but he knew it wouldn’t do any good. He played his flashlight over the walls and floor.

“Stop,” he said.

Up ahead, Sonny did. He dropped his head a little. His shoulders were tense like he was about to hit something.

“What?” he said.

Witt didn’t get any closer to him. He kept his light pointed at the floor a few feet in front of Sonny.

“Look down there.”

Sonny took a couple of steps forward and stood for a moment, then went down on one knee.

“I’ll be goddamned,” he said.

Witt came to where Sonny knelt. Their lights illuminated a length of monofilament fishing line across the hall about six inches off the ground. Sonny grinned up at Witt.

“What do you think? More spiders? Maybe ninjas’ll fall from the ceiling?”

“Don’t touch it,” said Witt as Sonny hooked a finger around the wire and pulled. It snapped. Witt froze. Nothing happened. Sonny looked up at him, then stood.

“I’ve got to give you points, man. You were right. Grandpa has been up to some funny games. But he’s still an addled old man. This one didn’t work.”

Witt looked around the hall, expecting more spiders to come raining down. But nothing happened. He pointed at something shiny near the ceiling.

“What’s that?” he said.

Sonny saw it, too. He moved closer, pulling a pistol from his jeans. He used the barrel to brush the tiny specks of light above his head. They made a small sound swinging against each other, like tiny wind chimes. It was fishhooks. Dozens of them hanging at eye level on more monofilament.

Sonny swept the gun barrel through the hooks, sending them swinging.

“This is good news. Know why?”

Witt shook his head.

“Because it means there’s something in this house worth protecting. We’re going to make ourselves some money tonight.”

Sonny ducked under the hooks and stood when he reached the other side. He turned all the way around, checking the floor and walls for wires. When he was done, he motioned for Witt to follow him.

Witt hated creeping under the hooks almost as much as the spiders. He darted through and didn’t stand again until he was past Sonny.

“We do the job just like we planned,” he said. “Just keep your eyes open for any more pranks.”

“Yeah. Okay,” said Witt.

“And get rid of that fucking doll. You look like an idiot.”

Witt looked down. He was still holding the doll with the string. He tossed it back down the hall the way they’d come and flinched, afraid it might set off another trap. But nothing happened.

“There’s another wire up ahead,” said Sonny. “I’ll go that way. You check the closet.”

As Sonny moved off, Witt checked the ceiling for hooks, and moved his light slowly over, around, and below the closet door frame. Ran his fingers around the doorknob feeling for a trip wire. He didn’t find one. He looked down at Sonny, wondering if he could just say he’d checked the closet. But Witt knew he wasn’t a good liar. There was nothing he could do.

He put his hand on the closet doorknob and turned. It opened. Nothing happened. He swung the door open the rest of the way and shone his flashlight inside.

The closet was full of rotting coats and rain boots, some umbrellas and a couple of canes with silver tops. Those could be worth something, he thought. There were boxes on the floor and more on a shelf above the coats. He checked around for more lines but didn’t see any signs of them. The canes first, he thought, and reached for one.

A board under his foot sank a couple of inches. Witt froze. There was a metal-on-metal squeak. He pointed his flashlight at the floor. A board with long butcher knives pushed through it hung a foot away from his legs. It was supposed to swing out when he stepped on the board and hit him in the knees, but the house had betrayed the old man. The hinge the board hung from was caked with rust. Witt was so happy he wanted to laugh, but he didn’t want to piss Sonny off by making noise. He grabbed one of the canes and stepped back. The board under his foot rose back up into place.

And another board swung out, this one chest-high. Witt jumped back, slamming his head into the wall opposite the closet. He went blind for a second as light exploded behind his eyes. When it cleared, he saw the second knife board, embedded in the closet door. It had missed him by a few inches. The doll he’d thrown away earlier lay by his side. He kicked it into the closet.

Footsteps pounded down the hall.

Sonny pushed him out of the way. He looked over the scene and then at Witt.

“You okay?”

Witt nodded, but he was still a little light-headed from his collision with the wall. Sonny grabbed his shoulders and pulled him to his feet.

“Fuck this,” said Sonny. “Let’s find him.”

He was already on the stairs when Witt saw it.

“Stop!” he yelled.

Too late.

He ducked as Sonny’s foot broke the fishing line.

A shotgun blast ripped across the hall, right by Sonny’s head. It looked like an old sawed-off was inside the wall, hidden behind a flap of wallpaper, now scorched and torn by the blast. Sonny stumbled down the stairs, holding a hand over one ear. He pulled his hand away and checked it. There was blood on the palm.

Witt came over.

“You okay?” he said.

Sonny looked at him for a second, then snapped out of it.

“I think I’m fucking deaf in this ear. I think that fucker blew out my eardrum.”

“Maybe we should get the knives and forks and just go,” said Witt.

Sonny took out his pistol.

“We’re not going anywhere. I’m going to find out what that old fuck has and kill him.”

Under normal circumstances, Witt would argue about something like killing a person, but these circumstances were damned far from normal and the old bastard was kind of asking for it, Witt thought. He followed Sonny up the stairs. They weren’t quiet as they went. The old man had to have heard the shotgun. There wasn’t any point in being quiet anymore.

“Careful,” Witt said.

A few steps up, Sonny said, “There’s another doll and another wire. Duck.”

Sonny bent over and when he was through, Witt followed him. As Sonny stood Witt saw the other line, the one strung so if you missed the first, you’d hit the second. Witt closed his eyes and what felt like a thousand pounds crashed down on them.

They were pinned to the steps. Sonny cursed and thrashed. Witt tried to push the weight off, but every time he moved, the net ripped into his skin. He managed to get his flashlight turned around and finally understood what had happened. The net they were trapped in was made of barbed wire. And they weren’t alone. There was a body with them. A bag of bones and rags. Some other poor asshole who’d wandered into the old man’s house and never left. Behind him, Sonny cursed and growled about all the ways he was going to murder the old man.

“Hold it,” said Witt. “Stop moving a minute.”

Sonny thrashed for a few seconds more and stopped.

“Barbed wire don’t weigh much, but this net has got big weights on the ends,” Witt said. “We keep thrashing, we’re going to wrap ourselves up and die here like Mr. Bones.”

“Who the fuck?” said Sonny.

“Turn your head.”

Sonny did. The net dug into Witt’s skin again as Sonny jerked back from the body.

“Fuck me,” said Sonny.

“What are we going to do?”

“One of us has got to get out. Then he can hold the net up for the other to get out.”

“So who does what?” said Witt.

“I hate to admit it, and if you repeat it I’ll deny it, but I think you’re stronger. I can’t lift for shit flat on my back here. You get me out and I can help you.”

“Okay,” said Witt. “Can you help push a little?”

“I’ll do what I can. Just keep those goddamn bones away from me.”

“How am I supposed to do that?”

“I don’t know. Forget it. Just push.”

Witt got hold of one of the weights holding the net in place. The problem was that it was wrapped in barbed wire. Each time he grabbed it, the metal barbs tore into his fingers and palms. On his first try, he moved the weight up about six inches before the pain got to be too much. The good news was that it allowed Sonny to turn and wriggle up next to him. They both got ahold of the weight and lifted it just high enough for Sonny to crawl out. Witt dropped the net back where it was. Sonny lay on the stairs, panting.

“Sonny?”

“Yeah.”

“Think you can start helping me out of here? I don’t want to spend the night with this dead boy.”

Sonny got to his knees and came up a step to where the weight lay. He put his hands on it and yanked them away.

“What’s wrong?” said Witt.

“That dead fucker touched me.”

“Use your jacket,” said Witt. “It’ll help with the barbs, and you won’t feel the bones.”

Sonny looked at him like Witt was speaking Chinese. Then he took his jacket off and wrapped it around his hands. Taking hold of the weight, he pulled up, leaning back against the staircase railing for support.

There was a spark and a thump. The weight came down, almost smashing into Witt’s hand. Sonny flopped on the stairs next to it.

“Sonny,” said Witt. “You all right?”

Sonny opened his eyes and looked at the banister.

“The railing is electrified. Zapped me good,” he said.

“Can you lift the weight without touching it?”

Sonny reached up and pulled off his ski mask. His face was slick with sweat. He wiped it out of his eyes with his jacket sleeve.

“No, I can’t,” he said. He looked over. Witt knew Sonny was staring at the bones more than looking at him. Sonny frowned.

“I think I’m about done here, hoss,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

Sonny put his jacket back on.

“I’m done. I’m over. The old fucker won.”

Sonny stood and pulled his ski mask back on. He jerked back when he almost touched the railing and shook his head.

“I’m sorry, man. I can’t help you.”

He turned and started down the stairs.

“Sonny,” yelled Witt. “Please!”

Sonny kept walking. Witt yelled after him. “You can keep my share of the forks and stuff. Just don’t leave me.”

Sonny stopped at the bottom of the stairs. Witt waited for him to come back up. Sonny said, “Sorry, man.” He turned and headed for the door.

“Sonny!”

Down in the dark, Sonny cursed.

“What is it?” said Witt.

“The goddamned door. It’s locked.”

Witt listened to Sonny walk around downstairs, cursing and punching things.

He came back into the hall.

“The windows are barred from the inside. What the hell kind of house did you bring me to? This is your fault, you hayseed prick. I hope you fucking rot up there with your dead pal.”

Witt watched as the circle of Sonny’s flashlight disappeared down the hall.

“Sonny?”

Silence.

“Sonny?”

Nothing.

Witt lay on the stairs sweating. He pulled his ski mask off, too. He tried wrapping it around his hand to keep the wire from tearing into his palms, but when he lifted the net, the barbs cut into him and he couldn’t hold on. His hands were ragged and bleeding. He lay there, breathing hard and trying not to completely lose his mind. Sonny was a thinker, but he lost it. Be a better thinker. What would a better thinker do?

Witt’s elbow brushed against the skeleton. He reached over and twisted one of the bone hands and, with some sweating and swearing, snapped it off at the wrist. He’d torn up his shoulders doing it, but it was worth it. He found the dead man’s other arm and snapped off the second hand. That’s when he noticed a doll duct-taped into the dead man’s mouth. Witt elbowed him away and turned back to the weight.

Balancing the skeleton hands over his palms, he grabbed the weight. When he pulled, the barbs dug into the bones, but didn’t touch his hands. It took three tries, but he finally got the weight high enough to set it on the step above him. Slowly, he crawled forward, using the skeleton’s hands to hold up as much of the net as possible.

He cut his legs up wiggling, but finally, he was out. Witt lay on the stairs facing the dead man. Another thief, he wondered? It couldn’t be the old man. Maybe his family were embezzlers and it was someone from the bank come to confront him. That meant Sonny was right all along. There was a treasure somewhere in the house, and now neither one of them was going to get it.

Witt stood and started down, careful not to touch the railing. A gunshot boomed through the house. He went down the stairs as fast as he could and crouched by the wall, keeping low. The place was quiet now.

“Sonny?” whispered Witt. “Sonny?”

He looked down the hall and saw an open door. Warm light, like dawn over a river, lit up the walls and floor. Yeah, he thought, Sonny was a yellow dog piece of coward shit, but if he left now, that would make him just as bad. Witt started down the hall. He’d lost his flashlight on the stairs, so he went slowly, looking for any trip wires he might have missed earlier.

The basement door was open. A doll was perched on the top step, nailed in place through the stomach. Witt looked at it for a good long while, searching for monofilament, funny floorboards, or electric wires. He didn’t find any, but he couldn’t make himself step past the doll. Maybe Sonny wasn’t close enough family to go searching this crazy-ass dump after all.

A voice echoed up the stairwell. Witt looked downstairs.

“Sonny?”

Something hit him in the back of the head and the building seemed to tilt, swing around, and hit him in the face. His vision collapsed to a tunnel and went out.

• • • •

Witt awoke handcuffed to a rough stone wall. His hands tingled with pins and needles, and his face hurt like fire. He tried to say something, but it hurt so much he screamed, only there wasn’t any sound. His lips were sewn shut.

The basement stank. The moist reek of decay down here was why the rest of the house smelled like Death shitting in a Dumpster. The blow on his head made it hard for Witt to see clearly. The glare from the bare bulbs strung along the ceiling hurt his eyes. He heard a splash, like someone was dragging wet laundry across the floor. Witt blinked, shook his head, and tried to focus.

Sonny hung on the wall like Jesus on the cross, held there with nails through his hands. A scrawny old man in overalls and a barbecue apron that read I LIKE MY PORK PULLED was gutting him with a long, curved butcher knife. The old man sawed his way up Sonny’s stomach, stopping when he hit the breastbone. Then he made a cut across Sonny’s belly, set down the knife, and reached inside, yanking out a long tangle of intestines. The old man let them flop into a plastic trashcan pushed up against the body. Sonny’s head moved from side to side as the old man worked. His eyes opened, showing the whites. Witt’s breath caught for a minute. Sonny was still alive. He wanted to scream, but remembered the pain.

The old man glanced at him, then turned back to his work.

“I’m not ignoring you, son,” the old man said. “It’s just that I’m a little busy right this second.” His voice startled Witt. He expected an old coot, but the voice was strong and cultured, like someone in one of those ancient-aliens documentaries on cable.

The old man pulled Sonny’s stomach wide, pinning the folds of skin to the wall with hooks and monofilament line. Sonny’s abdomen was splayed open like a wet red flower. The old man took the knife and cut a couple of more things from Sonny’s gut and dropped them into the trash. When he looked at Witt again, the old man’s gaze lingered on him.

“I suppose you’re wondering what’s going on,” he said, and smiled. “Since you’re in no position to ask questions, I’ll do my best to guess what you’d like to know.”

The old man tossed the knife onto a worktable and pulled off bloody dishwashing gloves, dropping them next to Sonny’s gun.

The man’s face was creased and yellow, like a kid Witt remembered from grade school. The one with hepatitis, and they’d all had to get shots because of him. The man’s knuckles were swollen and bent like he had rheumatism. His teeth were gray. Still, as beat-up as he was, the closer the old man got, the more Witt saw something hard and ferocious in his eyes.

“First of all, nothing you see here tonight is about torture or cruelty, though Lord knows you boys deserve a little of both, showing up here with a gun,” said the old man.

He turned and pointed to a couple of little dolls lying on his worktable.

“My eyes and ears,” he said. “I saw you two coming a mile away.” He looked at Witt. “Made all these dolls myself. A trick my grand-mère taught me long ago and far away. Made them out of ambitious boys like you and your friend.”

The old man wiped sweat out of his eyes and pushed back wisps of thin white hair.

“On the other hand, I’m grateful you’re here. If it wasn’t for boys, and a few girls, like you two, I wouldn’t be where I am today.” He held out his arms like the filthy basement was Hollywood Boulevard. “That was a joke,” he said. “Don’t try to laugh. It’ll hurt.”

When he got close, the old man held open each of Witt’s eyes and looked at them, like a doctor examining a patient. His breath smelled like a swamp and he wheezed a little. Witt tried to squirm from his hands.

The old man looked away for a moment, as if he was lost in thought.

“Did you ever think about living forever?” he said. “I don’t mean like fluttering off on angel wings and sipping tea with Jesus on a cloud, but living forever right here. Like a man. Well, I’m here to tell you, it can be done.” He smiled wide, showing his rotten teeth. “Now, I know what you’re thinking. If living forever looks like me, you’re not interested. But you see me, this body, it’s only a part of the story.”

Sonny moaned, and the old man walked back to him. He put on his gloves, picked up his knife, and got back to work, cutting into Sonny’s stomach. He talked as he worked.

“Immortality isn’t what you think it is. It’s not like in movies where you stay young and pretty forever. It’s harder than that, and in a way it’s more poetic. You live your life and grow old and when the time is right, you’re reborn in new flesh. A bit like a phoenix.” He turned to Witt. “You know what a phoenix is, don’t you? Surely even a crude lad like you must know that.”

Things from inside Sonny fell into the can.

“Your young friend here is my phoenix. When I shrug off this old meat, I’ll be reborn in his. But first,” he said, “I have to clear away the clutter.”

He winked at Witt and pulled out more of Sonny’s insides, until Witt could see his cousin’s spine.

“The heart and the brain. That’s all I need. They’re the only things I don’t take out.”

The old man stood, kicked off his work boots, and started to undress. He moved slowly, like each joint was stiff and painful.

When he struggled to get the apron up over his head, Witt pulled at the cuffs holding him to the wall. The ring that held the cuffs in place felt loose. He put slow, steady pressure on it, not wanting the old man to notice what he was doing.

Finally, the old man was naked. His skin sagged like it was melting off his bones. Patches of white, stiff tumbleweed hair bristled on his crotch and under his arms. He picked up the knife and looked over. Witt stopped moving.

“I know you think what I did to your friend hurt him, but consider this: At least he didn’t have to do it to himself. Watch this.”

The old man took the butcher knife and reached behind his head. He made a deep cut at the base of his skull, dragging the blade up and over his head to just above his eyebrows. This time, Witt screamed, and the pain brought tears to his eyes.

The old man’s hands were shaking when he set down the knife. He reached behind his head with both hands and pulled. The skin slid away from his skull like he was skinning a dead deer. He kept pulling, and the flesh came down over his face, his neck, his chest, and down his legs. He moaned the whole time, but the old man’s pain didn’t give Witt any satisfaction. He pulled on the ring that held his handcuffs to the wall. It turned a little. He kept twisting, wondering how long it would take the old man to snake all the way out of his skin, and if it was enough time to get free.

It wasn’t. Witt was still pinned tight when the last of the old man’s skin hit the floor. He stepped out of it like he was kicking off dirty socks and fell against his worktable, panting. A glistening wet mass of sagging muscle and bone, the old man reached over and picked up Sonny’s pistol. He pointed it at Witt.

“Stop that wiggling or I’ll do double worse to you what I did to your friend,” he said. “Besides, you’ll like this next part. Slithering out of my old skin isn’t fun, but I’m used to it. This next part is what really hurts.”

He pushed a stool under Sonny’s ass, then used a hammer to pull out the nails that held his hands to the wall. Sonny’s body dropped onto the stool like someone cutting the strings of a marionette. The old man eyed the opening in Sonny’s stomach like a Peeping Tom looking through a window, thought Witt.

The flayed man bent over, stiff and arthritic. When he was down as low as he could go, he grabbed his head and yanked it forward. Witt heard his neck snap. The old man screamed, and his head hung like it was held in place by spaghetti. Then he reached his arms around in front, like he was trying to hug himself. He jerked hard, dislocating both of his arms at the shoulder. Another scream. Witt closed his eyes, afraid he might throw up and drown inside his sealed lips.

The old man continued with whatever it was he was doing, the ritual coming to Witt as a series of horrible sounds. A wet tearing of muscles and snapping of bones. The old man’s screams. When the noise stopped, Witt opened his eyes a fraction of an inch. He couldn’t believe what he saw.

The old man lay on the filthy floor. He’d folded himself up like a goddamned origami bird. His legs were up around his shoulders, and his head was buried beneath his ankles. The only thing that still sort of worked were his arms, and even they were kind of loose and dangling. Groping blindly, the old man’s skinless hands went up Sonny’s body, finally stopping when they found the opening in his stomach. They got a good grip on the edges and hauled the rest of the old man’s body up and into the hole.

Witt knew that what he was doing would never work. There was no way he could get his whole body into Sonny’s stomach. And yet, as Witt watched, the old man did it. By whatever magic or skill or madness he’d learned over the years, the old man kept squeezing and squeezing his body tighter and tighter until he’d worked his way completely inside Sonny. Then he reached out and pulled the loose stomach flaps closed. The slits he’d cut into them healed as Witt watched.

Sonny twitched. His body went stiff. His eyes fluttered. He relaxed and his head fell forward. He pissed himself. Then he laughed.

“That always cracks me up,” Sonny said. “I start off each new life by pissing myself like an infant. It’s all right. It’s how I know all the plumbing is working.”

Sonny stood, holding himself with his hand against the wall. He took a stiff step. Then another, his balance coming back to him. He breathed deeply, as if relishing this new, younger flesh.

“Que penses-tu de ma nouvelle poupée?” he said, then, “What do you think of my new doll?”

As Sonny came over to him, Witt braced himself against the wall like maybe if he pushed hard enough he could pass through solid stone.

When Sonny reached him, he held Witt’s head in his hands.

“The worst part is over. Don’t worry about me gutting you like your friend. All I need from you is your head. I just pull out the skull, scrape the fat from the inside of the skin, and shrink the rest of it down for one of my dolls.”

He looked around the basement.

“These dolls are old. I’ll be moving on soon, and I’ll need new ones. You’ll be the first in my new life. Try to relax. It’ll hurt less if you’re calm. Be extra good and I’ll kill you quick with the gun.”

The thing that used to be Sonny went and picked up the old man’s skin from the floor. He dumped it into the garbage can with Sonny’s insides. It took him a while to drag the can over to an ancient gas furnace. He didn’t quite have the hang of the new body yet.

While Sonny had his back to him, Witt pulled as hard as he could on the ring holding the handcuffs. He picked his feet off the floor, using his body weight to pull down. The cuffs felt like hot metal digging into his wrists. He gritted his teeth and swallowed so he wouldn’t make any noise. He felt the ring move an inch. Then another. But the pain was too much. His vision started fogging again, and he was afraid he might pass out. He put his feet on the floor and looked over. The old man had the body parts in the furnace and was fiddling around with the controls. He touched handles and gauges randomly, like he was having trouble remembering how they worked. Good, thought Witt. He still had some time. If he could get to the table, he could get the gun. That’s all I need.

Witt took a breath, getting ready for the pain when he pulled his feet off the floor. Hanging there, his hands turning dark with trapped blood and feeling like they were going to pop off, he raised his head.

He stopped what he was doing when he saw the doll nailed to a beam a few feet above. That’s why the old man was taking his time. He knew everything Witt was doing. He wasn’t going anywhere. And probably, he thought, he wasn’t going to get that quick death after all.

©2015 by Richard Kadrey. Originally published in The Doll Collection, edited by Ellen Datlow. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Richard Kadrey is the New York Times bestselling author of fifteen novels, including the Sandman Slim supernatural noir series. Sandman Slim was included in Amazon’s “100 Science Fiction & Fantasy Books to Read in a Lifetime.” Chad Stahelski of John Wick fame is set to direct the book as a feature film. He’s also written comics for Heavy Metal, Lucifer, and Hellblazer. His newest book is Hollywood Dead.

A Hundred Thousand Arrows

Ashok K. Banker | 11890 words

1

After decades of warring, a time of peace came to the Krushan dynasty. The great armies of the Burnt Empire set aside their battle armor and weapons in exchange for flowers and rice.

A great celebration lit up the streets of Hastinaga, the capital city.

The marriage of Emperor Sha’ant and his unusual new Empress, Jilana.

The daughter of a fisher chief married to the Emperor of the greatest empire in the known world!

This in itself was highly unusual.

The circumstances in which the marriage had occurred were even more unusual.

It was the stuff of legends, and even though the Burnt Empire bred legends as easily as a sugarcane crop breeds snakes, some legends bear telling more than others.

2

Prince Regent Vrath’s terrible oath of lifelong celibacy was already the stuff of legend. Everyone knew that the heir to the world’s largest empire had sworn to never cohabit in order to ensure that his new stepmother Jilana’s future progeny would be the only ones with a claim to the throne. Jilana herself bore no animosity toward Vrath; if anything, his unprecedented vow earned him her admiration and respect. But she was visibly proud of her undisputed status as Empress and mother of the future heirs of the great empire.

And so Sha’ant and Jilana were married and now lived together in great happiness. With his second wife, Sha’ant found all the fulfillment he desired. Even more than with his first, long-mourned wife Jeel, he experienced the full spectrum of companionship, for Jilana was mortal and had no great secrets, nor any hidden agenda. In fact, it was for the ways in which she differed from Jeel that Jeel herself had chosen her as Sha’ant’s second mate, guiding him unknowingly towards Jilana’s boat on that fateful day of their first encounter.

In time, he filled her womb with child and she gave birth to a beautiful son. They named him Gada. From the very outset, he was fond of sports and games of valor, and it was evident he would turn out to be a brave and famous warrior. Soon after, Jilana gave birth to a second son, whom they named Virya. While unable to keep up with his elder brother in sports, Virya discovered that he was superior with the bow and concentrated his efforts on mastering that weapon. Soon he was one of the best young archers in the city.

But their happiness did not last. The malaise of dynasty that had plagued the kingdom since the origin of their race continued to take its toll upon all those who called themselves Krushan as well—and before his sons could attain full maturity, the great King Sha’ant sadly succumbed to a fatal illness.

Sha’ant and Jilana’s eldest son Gada had been named heir, and Gada took his position and his father’s loss very seriously—perhaps too seriously, as his subsequent actions would soon show.

Very shortly after inheriting the throne and just beyond the age of majority, Gada was challenged to a duel by a powerful harva. Like other urrkh, harva were powerful demon-mortal mixed breeds, imbued with the physical form and limitations of humans but driven by the needs and appetites of all urrkh, the demon races; they often served as spies and provocateurs acting on behalf of their urrkh brethren. For years, the harva had sought to lure Vrath into combat, in order to ferret out the demi-god’s weaknesses, if any, so that other urrkh might note them and learn how to defeat the most feared Krushan warrior. Unable to draw the legendary Vrath into battle, the harva saw his opportunity to best a Krushan king by provoking Gada instead. Against Vrath’s advice, the young king agreed to the combat with the notorious trickster.

One day toward the end of winter, Gada and the harva met on the banks of the river Hiranyavati and began to fight.

Days later, they were still fighting and camp had to be set up nearby to provide for them and their supporters.

Both opponents were evenly matched.

What Gada possessed in size, bulk, and strength, his opponent matched in agility, force, and speed.

Usually, when two warriors with contradictory talents met in combat, one tended to overcome the other. But in this case, both inflicted injury upon injury on the other without being able to deal a fatal or deadly blow. Somehow, their different body types and fighting styles, even their disparate physiques, erased each one’s advantage, and they clashed again and again without a conclusive outcome.

One thing that both had in common was endurance and stubborn determination.

Their duel continued for three long years with neither warrior able to prove himself superior.

Finally resorting to trickery, the harva used urrkh maya—the power of illusion—to delude the young Krushan king, seemingly turning himself into a mirror image of Gada. Gada was inexperienced and untested enough that he fell for the ploy. Unnerved at facing himself in combat, Gada hesitated but for a moment, yet it was enough for the harva to at long last strike a fatal blow. But even as Gada fell, he struck back, slaying his opponent in turn. Both opponents died together, equally matched in death as they had been in life.

After this tragedy, Vrath installed Jilana’s younger son Virya as the king of Hastinaga. Virya was still but a boy and was sensible enough to know that Vrath, though he held no official titles, was the real force behind the governance and administration of the empire. So he did as his stepbrother advised and the kingdom ran as efficiently as ever, for the people and the enemies of the kingdom all knew that so long as Vrath stood by the throne, none could challenge it successfully.

3

Unlike his over-eager brother, Virya had no appetite for war.

Perhaps it was the result of growing up in his brother’s shadow during his formative years, watching his elder sibling achieve such mastery at such a young age—and knowing he could never match that level of achievement or talent. And, then, later, to see that same valorous brother—whom he had come to think of as indomitable and invulnerable—killed in combat . . . perhaps the shock was too great, or perhaps he simply lacked as great a desire to do battle, but Virya was careful to choose his fights wisely and engage in violence only when he had no other option.

When he did fight, Virya did so bravely and fiercely and none could question his ability or his courage. But with Vrath as his champion and protector, he rarely had occasion to lift a sword or put arrow to bowstring.

And this perhaps was the real reason why Virya had never had a chance to acquire the fame of a warrior as had his brother and so many others in their line before him, for who could emerge from the shadow of Vrath—and why would Vrath ever let his ward face any unnecessary risks? Vrath was twice as protective of Virya now that Gada was gone, leaving this slender and quiet young man the sole heir to the throne of Hastinaga. Indeed, Vrath seemed to go to great lengths to ensure that the young prince was never put in the path of danger for any reason.

This became most evident when Virya became an adult and of marriageable age. Vrath and his stepmother Jilana both knew that it was imperative that Virya marry soon and sire children in order to further the dynasty. It was rare for there to be only one Krushan male extant; if anything were to happen to Virya, the dynasty would come to an abrupt end, and that would be the greatest tragedy of all. Vrath assured Jilana that he would not allow such a thing come to pass.

So when he heard that the king of Serapi was seeking suitable husbands for his three daughters, each of whom were famed for their beauty and talents, Vrath resolved that he would marry at least one of them to Virya.

The opportunity presented itself when the lord of Serapi invited all the kings of the land to come and prove their prowess at arms at a mate-pairing event known as a swayamvara; each would compete to claim the attention of the lord of Serapi’s daughters, each of whom would then choose her husband from the victors.

Tradition dictated that Virya attend the swayamvara and compete for the hand of the Serapi princesses. But Vrath knew the level of competition was extremely high—far higher than his ward was capable of matching. At best, Virya might fare as well as some of the others in archery; at worst, he would be hopelessly humiliated and stand no chance of winning the hand of any of the Serapi lord’s daughters.

After all, Virya had grown up in the shadow of his brother—but also of the legendary Vrath—and this had made him less aggressively inclined than most Krushan princes. Vrath knew the kings who would be attending the swayamvara: They were lions and hyenas and would happily tear one another apart with their bare hands to do nothing more than prove their masculine superiority; with three beautiful princesses at stake, they would do almost anything.

In such a contest, there was no way Virya would return home alive.

Vrath knew what he must do.

The harsh, cruel customs of the Burnt Empire, often seen as rapacious, predatory, and unabashedly aggressive, were not his natural way. Vrath was a man of gentle graces and quiet power. He preferred to win by speaking softly and carrying a very big sword. But there were times that called for something more assertive. Tradition demanded now that Vrath find brides for his half-brother Virya without risking the prince heir’s own life. Even outright abduction was considered acceptable practice under the circumstances! Such were the ways of the Krushan.

But Vrath was only half-Krushan and though his aloof manner and unstoppable drive could be seen as cruel and overriding, he was in fact simply a man focused on doing what was needed. When his father Sha’ant had sought to marry Jilana, and had required that enormous sacrifice from Vrath, his vow of celibacy had allowed Vrath to play the hero. But now, if the Krushan dynasty was to continue, Vrath would have to play the villain.

He went about it as he went about everything else: in legendary manner.

4

Vrath had a single large chariot prepared for himself and set out for Serapi, having informed neither Jilana nor Virya of the swayamvara or his plan.

When he arrived at the tournament pavilion, he observed the thousands gathered there. There were hundreds of participants alone: all kings of larger or lesser kingdoms, each a champion in his own right. In addition, tens of thousands of Kosalans had come to view the competition.

Upon the great dais sat King Kashya, after whom the capital city of Kosala was named. Beside him were three young women of such breathtaking beauty that even Vrath, celibate though he was, knew that he could not find a better wife for Virya if he were to search the entire kingdom.

Swayamvaras were elaborate affairs and King Kashya intended to make the swayamvara of his daughters the grandest ever. There were endless formal gestures and protocols, culminating in a lengthy laborious recitation of the long list of participants, with suitable introductions for each of the kings present. This itself went on for an hour or more and it was while the recitation was at its most boring point, with even the kings themselves eager for the contest to be underway, that Vrath made his move.

Striding onto the dais, Vrath boldly approached the bejeweled thrones upon which the three princesses sat. They looked up at the unexpected stranger, puzzled at his sudden appearance. Vrath smiled at them, then bent down and grasped their wrists. His hand was large enough to clutch two of them in one fist, and he caught hold of the third princess’s arm with his other hand. Forcing them to their feet, he began walking off the dais with them in tow. At first the princesses were too shocked to react. They stumbled after him, not fully comprehending what was going on. It was their father the king who saw the tall black-bearded man leading his daughters away and rose to his feet, stunned.

“Halt!” cried Kashya. “Unhand my daughters! Who are you? How dare you lay hands on my princesses?”

Vrath continued without responding.

“Guards,” cried the king. “Stop that man!”

There were thousands of guards present at the event and all of them were alerted by the king’s cries. The announcer who had been droning on with his recitation of the names of the participants ceased speaking, and by degrees everyone present began to grow aware of the commotion on the royal dais. Several scores of soldiers began approaching and surrounding the dais, blocking Vrath’s path. With drawn swords, spears and bows, they threatened him on every side.

In response, Vrath pushed the one princess towards her two sisters and grasped hold of all three wrists in his left hand. Then, with his right hand he drew his sword and held it to their throats, or close enough that he could stab them with a quick jab if he wished.

At once, the king cried out in dismay. “Please! Do not harm them! They are the jewels of my life. Tell me what it is you desire.”

Vrath indicated the soldiers with a jerk of his head. “Ask your soldiers to withdraw. Let no one threaten me or your daughters may fare the worse for it. I will not leave without a fight, and if we fight, these three jewels will surely be reduced to precious dust.”

King Kashya swiftly gave orders for the soldiers to back away. Vrath saw that his request was being obeyed and waited for a pathway to be cleared so he could leave with the princesses. Meanwhile, they had begun to struggle against his grip. Amber, the eldest, struggled most fiercely, and when she found herself unable to break free of her captor’s iron grip, she said to her sisters, “He must be too cowardly to take part in the swayamvara and win us by fair means, therefore he manhandles us and steals us away by force!”

Vrath grinned at her words and turned to her father, the king. “Kashya! Your daughter calls me a coward. Do you think me one as well?”

The king was too diplomatic to answer aloud but stared balefully back at the abductor of his daughters.

It was Ember, the second sister, who spoke up. She said spitefully, “What else can we think of a man who behaves in this barbaric fashion? If not a coward, a barbarian!”

Vrath laughed long and hard. The other kings, now aware of what was going on, stared balefully at the man who was attempting to steal away the women they had dreamed of making their wives. “Listen to me, all of you! My name is Vrath, son of Sha’ant. Do you know who I am?”

At the mention of his name, all present reacted. Champions and warriors all, they each knew who he was and what he was capable of doing on the battlefield. “Do you think me a coward?” he asked. “Or a barbarian?”

They shook their heads, many speaking aloud to say “Nay.”

The king of Serapi knew who Vrath was too. He decided to chance speaking: “Then why do you do this deed? You are a legendary warrior from one of the greatest dynasties. If you desire one of my daughters as your wife, win her hand fairly. If the legends are true, you are capable of besting all the kings present here!”

“I am,” Vrath said, completely without arrogance for he knew this to be a simple fact, “and that is precisely why I assert my right to take your daughters home today. I do not need to participate in this weeklong contest to prove my superiority at arms. And surely all these men gathered here today do not wish to die by my hand. But I wish you to know that I do not do this for myself, for I have taken a lifelong vow of celibacy. I am taking them to Hastinaga to be wives to my ward Virya. Take comfort in the fact that they shall be queens of Hastinaga, Serapi-naresh. Surely you would take pride in that?”

Kashya had to admit the thought of being allied to the House of Krushan was a fine one. The Krushan nation was more powerful than any of the others represented here. He was silenced by Vrath’s words.

But his daughters were not. “What of our choice?” cried Umber, the third sister. “In a swayamvara, we have the right to choose our husbands from among the victors. This violates our right to choose!”

Vrath nodded. “I cannot argue with that. But under Krushan law, this form of marriage is equally acceptable. It is one of the eight known forms. And as your father and many others here will attest, it is a long time-honored tradition to take brides by force. If any here is brave enough to stop me, I shall face him in combat and prove my worth. If not, then I assert my right to win these princesses for my ward Virya!”

And with these words, he began walking again, dragging the princesses past the cordon of guards that stood and watched powerlessly as he went up to his chariot. Lashing the girls to the reins-post so they could not escape while he drove, he started the chariot and began riding away at great speed. He had asked his charioteers to harness the strongest fastest horses in the royal stable, and the chariot raced away from Serapi with the speed of lightning. At once, each of the kings present began donning his armor and calling for his chariot or horse in order to give pursuit. A few were wary enough of Vrath’s reputation to abstain from any direct conflict, but they were willing to follow to view the encounter.

The king of Serapi’s chief minister asked him if the army was to be sent out to follow after the princesses.

King Kashya watched the hundreds of kings who had come to participate in the swayamvara, clambering aboard their chariots and mounting their horses, clad in full armor, each accompanied by their retinue of personal guards, all wheeling and turning to leave the city, giving chase to the kidnapped princesses. “How many armies shall we send?” he asked. “Besides, these were the men who were to compete for their hands in marriage. Let this be their test.”

The chief minister was an old man and he saw the wisdom in the king’s words. In older times, this was in fact what a swayamvara meant: a melee in which all suitors fought to the death. Once the dust and blood spatter settled, the women chose their husbands from among those left standing. All Vrath had done was to cut short the ceremonial pomp and regress the event to its older, more brutal origins. Now, all that remained was to wait and see who “won.”

5

They were less than a yojana out of Serapi when Amber called out triumphantly: “Here they come!” Her sisters cried out with matching enthusiasm.

Vrath glanced back over his shoulder. Driving an eight-horse team required constant adjustment and a single error of judgement could bring down the entire team, most likely hobbling or crippling several of the horses. The journey to Hastinaga was a long one and he needed all eight to carry the combined weight of the chariot and four persons. It was the reason why he had not brought even a charioteer, preferring to take on this task alone rather than rely on anyone else. Alone was how he fought best. He allowed himself a single glance back.

They had pursuers.

An unfurling cloud of dust was visible on the horizon, perhaps half a yojana behind them. At that rate, they would catch up with Vrath’s chariot very quickly. He had expected that. He didn’t know the territory here too well, otherwise he would have picked a suitable vantage point and waited for them to come to him. He could still do that: This was a hilly region and there were any number of high spots which made suitable defensive sites. But he discarded that option in an instant: He had no desire to prolong this fight. Stopping and picking a spot could easily turn into a long siege. His pursuers had only to surround him and keep overwhelming him with force of numbers. He would not lose in the end but the princesses would likely end up dead as a result, if not from the crossfire then from starvation, thirst, or exposure.

So he chose to ride on, increasing speed. He would force the enemy to come to him and fight him on the run. Few warriors could fight well from a chariot and it would weed out the ineffectual and incompetent. Those that remained would have to use their best efforts right away or risk being outpaced. This way, he would force the fight to begin and end quickly, reducing the risk to the princesses to a minimum.

The princesses took his increase of speed to mean the exact opposite, of course.

“See, Ember, Umber,” said the eldest one with the sharp tongue. “He is too cowardly to stand and fight, so he tries to run away. He does not realize that Shalva will catch him no matter how fast he rides!”

Vrath wondered who this Shalva might be, but knew better than to speak just then. He focused his attention on steering the team across a rocky path, trying as best as he could to avoid one of them stepping on the fist-sized rocks that lay strewn about everywhere.

They took his silence to mean fear as well. “You speak truly, Amber,” said the third sister Umber. “It will not be long now before we are saved and can return home.”

Vrath smiled at that. He finished negotiating the rocky path and saw that the way ahead was clear for a good few miles. “Is that what you wish?” he asked, speaking loudly enough to be heard above the sound of the horses and the chariot and the wind. “To return home . . . and continue the swayamvara?”

“Yes!” said Ember, the middle one. “For that way we have pride of choice and dignity!”

Vrath laughed at her pomposity and naivete. “You foolish girl! If you really wish to have pride and dignity, you would not have a swayamvara at all. You would simply choose your man and marry him. That is true freedom of choice.”

They exclaimed at the absurdity of this suggestion. “How would we know if he is the best at arms or not?” asked the eldest again, her beautiful brown eyes flashing angrily.

Vrath had to admit she was the most attractive of the three, if also the most shrewish. “Why should a man only be best at arms to be a suitable husband? Can he not simply be a good man? A loving, caring, sensitive, educated, intelligent man?” He was describing Virya although she did not know it.

She wrinkled her nose at him as if he had suggested she marry a bird or a fish instead of a man. “A man who cannot best others at arms to prove his love is not fit to be my husband,” she said haughtily. “Or the husband of either one of my sisters!”

Vrath laughed long and hard at that. She did not understand why he laughed and turned away, after shooting him a last smoldering look of fury. He was surprised to find himself provoked, perhaps even a little aroused by that look. But he had long since mastered his senses and desires and his arousal was more by way of a faint memory of what arousal had once been rather than the actual sensation. Still, it took him by surprise, to encounter a woman who evoked even the memory of that feeling within him. He thought it would be a fine thing to see this one, Amber, eat her words and accept that she was wrong. And he also thought that she would be a difficult but strong wife for Virya.

Their pursuers caught up with them after another yojana. Vrath felt them coming by the change in the vibrations from the chariot. There were at least a hundred of them in the first group itself, with others forced to follow only due to the limitations of the terrain. He felt also that several would be taking different routes to try to cut them off at various points, some to lay ambushes ahead. He grinned to himself. It would be an interesting journey home, that was certain.

He bent to pick up his bow, to string it. He could, of course, have summoned his celestial bow—that unbreakable, formidable divine weapon that could outmatch any man-made one—but he chose to use a simple unmagical one instead, perhaps to even the odds in his mortal opponent’s favor. He sensed one of the princesses watching him balefully and glanced at her: It was Amber, of course. She turned her eyes away when he caught her looking and he sensed that she had been sizing him up, evaluating him as a warrior. And perhaps something more.

“Who is Shalva?” he asked casually as he strung the bow. The effort didn’t exert him at all, and he noted the way her eyes narrowed at the ease with which he bent the longbow and strung it deftly.

She did not answer at once. He waited, not pressing her, acting as if the question hardly mattered to him, which in fact it did not.

“He is the one who would have won me,” she said shortly, then looked away as if regretting having answered. But something occurred to her and she turned back almost at once. “And will do so even now,” she asserted vehemently.

“He shall certainly have his chance,” Vrath replied jovially. “But do not judge him too harshly if he fails. Winning at arms is not the only victory.”

She stared at him as if he had spoken a foreign language. “Of course it is!” she said indignantly. “You only say that because you are afraid you will lose and be killed!”

He smiled sadly at her. “There is much you do not know about the world, princess Amber,” he said. “And I am one of those things.”

She stared at him in complete incomprehension. Then, frustrated, she turned away again and ignored him. She spoke to her sisters and all three of them looked back and watched as the dust cloud following them coalesced into recognizable forms.

Vrath counted at least four score chariots hard on their heels. Of them, about two hands’ count would reach arrow range in moments. And one of them, a bright shining gold-inlaid chariot that reflected the late morning sun’s rays like a mirror, was far ahead of the pack, already within arrow range and gaining fast. He wondered why that forerunner had not started firing arrows yet, then realized the reason: He was afraid of hitting the princesses by mistake.

He smiled to himself. That was one of the things he had hoped for when he had decided upon this plan. At least for now, the desire to prove themselves superior warriors was still outweighed by their desire to gain wives. It was when that balance shifted to the former desire that the real fighting would commence.

The forerunner drew closer, and as he approached, the two younger sisters exclaimed and turned to their elder sister, smiling. “There he comes! We knew he would come!”

Out the corner of his eye, Vrath saw Amber smile. She sensed him watching her covertly and glanced at him. He turned to look at her and she turned away at once, but not before he had seen the uncertainty clouding her beautiful brown eyes. She is intelligent enough to know that this will not be as simple as she would like it to be. Or else I would not have been able to abduct her and her sisters in the first place, from under the very aquiline noses of several thousand armed men in the heart of her own homeland.

Yes, he thought, smiling inwardly, this one would make a very good wife for Virya! He only hoped that Virya would be able to keep her under control.

The thundering of chariot wheels grew steadily behind them until the forerunner was only a few score yards behind. When the distance between them had reduced to three score yards, Vrath saw sunlight flash on something metallic as it left the chariot and rose into the air in a bowing arc. “Keep your heads down,” he told the three princesses matter-of-factly. “And don’t get in my way.” He looked at each of them in turn, making sure their eyes met and he communicated his seriousness. “Don’t even try,” he said, his voice steely. “Even if one of you survives the trip, that will be acceptable to me.”

He saw their eyes widen as they realized what he meant. All their lives, they had encountered only men who obeyed their every command or desired them intensely enough to do as they desired. He was probably the first man who didn’t care if any of them lived or died.

The javelin was beautifully launched, taking into consideration the respective speeds of both chariots, the wind factor, and the precise location of the target. Vrath estimated that it would land precisely on his back, punching a hole through his rib cage and bursting his lungs, to explode out of his chest. The wound would be a mortal one, instantly fatal. There would be no escaping it. And due to the nature of the road, he could neither swerve the chariot to avoid it, for fear of striking against one of the many large boulders bordering the road on either side, nor leave the reins for fear of the horses veering slightly off path and the chariot striking the same boulders.

So he did the only thing he could. Waiting until the last instant, judging the trajectory of the falling javelin exactly as the thrower himself had done, he reached out and snatched the falling missile out of the air. The sound of the heavy wood slapping hard into his palm was shockingly loud, even above the thundering of the horse hooves and chariot wheels. The force of the impact was enough to jar him to his heels. But he caught it perfectly, the deadly metal-coated point barely inches from his back.

He turned to glance at the princesses. They were gaping wide-eyed at his hand, the one holding the javelin.

“Sisters, did you see . . .?” asked the youngest one.

They nodded dumbly, too stunned to speak.

Vrath grinned at them, then, turning from the waist without leaving the reins, he sent the javelin flying back the way it had come, but at a direct trajectory. The missile flew back as straight as an arrow shot from a bow, and passed within a hair’s breadth of the forerunner’s chariot. The weapon’s passing startled the horses into loud whinnies, even as it embedded itself in the front armor plate of the chariot. The chariot shook with the impact and the man driving it stared down with eyes that showed white even at this distance, realizing what Vrath intended him to realize: that he had deliberately thrown the weapon to warn him away, not injure or kill.

“The next one will go through your chest,” Vrath murmured, and turned back to mind his horses. He had only taken his eyes off the road for a few moments and already the team leader had begun dragging them leftwards. He straightened them out as he heard a familiar whistling sound that could mean only one thing.

“Arrow shower,” he sighed.

He raised his bow and loosed a single arrow, firing up into the air.

Then he continued driving the chariot without looking back.

6

Amber had never seen a warrior like the man who called himself Vrath. He was terrible, monstrous, awful. The nerve of the man, to storm into her father’s city and abduct her sisters and her away while every suitor who desired them watched helplessly! What audacity! And the way he had spoken to her father—she had seen her father’s face change when he announced his name and dynasty. She knew of the Krushan Empire and the Krushan race too. In a sense, they were the mother race of all who lived upon the subcontinent. And their nation was one of the most powerful, widest, and richest. Had their name been called during the recitation of suitors participating, she would have felt a thrill of excitement at being desired as the wife of such a great House. But to be abducted like this was humiliating and degrading! She had prayed for Shalva, her beloved, to come and slaughter this impudent bearded giant and cut off his head . . . or worse.

But then she had seen the way he caught the javelin. She had never witnessed anything so miraculous. She had seen a man catch a javelin once, but that had been on an open field, where the man had been able to watch for the javelin’s approach and adjust his body to catch it. This Vrath fellow had been driving a chariot team of eight horses, looking ahead, and he had simply stuck out his hand and caught the javelin as it fell. How was such a thing even possible? How could he have seen and judged its approach so perfectly, and how much strength did it take to stop a flung javelin like that? She could hardly imagine. It was a godlike feat, the kind written about it in the fables one read in the puranas and itihasas. Something that Indra once did, or Varuna or Vayu.

Now, she watched with wide eyes as he shot a single arrow upwards, this time not even glancing back to judge the trajectory, wind speed and direction or any of the myriad factors involved in a precise bow shot.

What impudence! How could anyone possibly aim an arrow without seeing? By sound alone? What if he misjudged? There were so many factors to consider, it was not remotely possible that he could hit his mark. Even if he didn’t care whether or not he struck true—even if he was simply shooting blindly to dissuade the pursuer—what about the arrows shot by Shalva that were now falling towards him, only an instant away from killing him?

Yes, arrows. Plural. For Shalva had loosed his legendary astra, the Hailstorm. A single thick arrow that split open during flight to divide into numerous smaller darts, each deadly enough to punch through armor and deal a serious injury, if not a mortal blow. It took great strength to simply loose such an arrow, and a special bow that required three men’s strength to bend and string. Once shot, Shalva had claimed, it never failed. He had downed entire companies of enemy soldiers with that arrow. He had even demonstrated it once to her, showering an area three yards square with scores of tiny deadly black darts.

Amber had never expected to see the same weapon deployed at her.

If even one of those strikes me or my sisters in a vital organ, she thought as she watched the hail of missiles descend towards her, we will surely die.

She realized that Shalva must know that. Which meant that he had chosen to loose it anyway, risking her lives and the lives of her sisters, in order to stop their abductor from getting away.

Stupid man, she wanted to scream.

But then Vrath had loosed his single arrow.

And as it shot up, she found herself unable to take her eyes off it, even though the Hailstorm would strike down in an instant.

Vrath’s arrow rose up and burst into a hundred fragments.

Each of the fragments flew sideways, parallel to the surface of the earth, like a flock of birds that rose upwards then suddenly split off to go their separate ways.

The fragments of Vrath’s arrows sliced through the Hailstorm.

Amber watched in disbelief as the fragments cut each of the several black missiles into half, rendering them harmless as well as halting their progress.

The chariot thundered on, and the pieces of Shalva’s fabled Hailstorm clattered to the dusty road behind the chariot, useless pieces of metal and wood.

“How—?” she started to ask, then stopped.

Vrath’s face had turned as dark as a storm cloud.

“He meant to kill you as well!” he roared. She recoiled at the sound of his voice. It was louder than any voice she had heard before. She had heard men bellowing before, but never so loudly. She had not thought it possible for any man’s voice to be this loud! “He was able to judge my ability from that single catch and counterstrike, and because of my reputation, he assumes that he will not be able to defeat me fairly. Therefore he continues to strike from behind in violation of Krushan warrior code and attempts to slay you innocents as well! This is unacceptable!”

Amber felt her sisters clutch her arms for comfort, frightened by the anger and intensity of Vrath’s roaring. Amber herself was more frightened by the knowledge that he was right: Shalva had meant to kill them, or else he would never have used the Hailstorm.

“Kill him then,” she heard herself say, her voice barely a croak lost in the thundering of hooves and wheels.

Vrath turned his head towards her and she had a moment when she felt as if he would surely strike out at her. He possessed the power and rage to do it. But she saw his eyes and they were not filled with hatred for her, only curiosity.

“Kill him then!” she repeated, loud enough that he could hear her clearly. “He has already forfeited me by targeting my sisters and myself. So do what you must to save us. I will never accept him as my husband now.”

Vrath’s face cleared as suddenly as it had clouded. It reminded her of a time when she was younger and had been looking down at her reflection in a lotus pond, wondering if she really was as beautiful as everyone said she was. A cloud had passed across the sun just then and she had been startled, thinking something had changed in her face, then realized it was only a change in the sky. The way her own reflection had darkened then cleared as the cloud moved across the sun was exactly the way Vrath’s face darkened and cleared. He is as transparent as water itself if you know how to gauge him, she thought, and the insight moved her deeply for some reason.

Vrath smiled at her. “I did not ask for nor need your permission, milady,” he said, in a tone that mocked her lightly. At that, her anger flared again and she hated him once more.

But she watched with new interest as he raised his bow again, shut his eyes, and loosed another arrow.

She watched the arrow rise at the same instant as Shalva loosed another arrow as well. Because she was watching so intently, she knew that Vrath had loosed his own arrow a fraction of an instant before Shalva had done the same. She knew also that Vrath had his eyes shut and was facing forward, one hand still gripping the reins even as it gripped the bow—another impossible feat she would not have thought possible if she had not witnessed it herself—and so he could not possibly have seen Shalva fire his arrow.

Yet when she looked back she realized that Vrath must have predicted Shalva’s actions, and countered with the perfect attack.

Shalva’s arrow rose at a sharp angle, as if climbing a mountain gradient rather than sketching a rainbow curve. She knew what that meant as well: It was Acidfire. The arrow that passed directly above its intended target, showering droplets of powerful acid as it went. Even a single drop of that acid was toxic enough to burn through skin, flesh, and bone itself, causing unbearable agony if not the end of the targeted enemy.

But because Vrath’s arrow had been loosed an instant earlier, it arrived while Shalva’s arrow was still rising sharply, at its slowest point, before the ventricles had opened to release the acid. Vrath’s arrow burgeoned like a sheet hung to dry on a windy day, spreading outwards in all directions to completely envelope Shalva’s arrow.

Shalva’s struck the enveloping folds of cloth and instead of ripping through, was enfolded in the fabric and plummeted groundward. It fell with a useless plop to the ground and was trampled underfoot by Shalva’s own team of horses.

Amber gazed at Vrath in amazement. He grinned at her. “A good warrior always knows the enemy’s next move.”

Then his face darkened again. “This time he meant you not merely to die, but to suffer.”

Her heart was chilled by the knowledge that once again, he was right. The Acidfire was an arrow Shalva would only use if he felt personal animosity towards the enemy. She looked back with sudden growing hatred at the chariot of the man she had been prepared to marry that very day. “How could you, Shalva?” she shouted, shaking her fist at the pursuing chariot.

In response, Shalva loosed again. This one aimed directly at them, not at an angle. She watched in horror as the missile sped towards them at the speed of wind, and reacted to the sight of it splintering into a score of tiny metal flechettes, each sharp enough to tear through flesh and cause great pain and damage.

Before the shower of metal flechettes could reach their chariot, an arrow shot from beside her raced to meet them, splitting itself into as many pieces, each of these pieces obstructing the flechettes and dropping them harmlessly to the ground. She turned back to stare at Vrath, who was lowering his bow, still looking ahead to watch the road. She understood that his aim had been perfect, but how could the metal pieces in his arrow have perfectly blocked every single flechette coming at them? Could anyone loose an arrow with such a precise degree of skill?

That was when she first began to realize that Vrath was no mere mortal. And when she first fell in love with him.

7

Vrath grew steadily angrier with Shalva as the suitor continued pursuing them and continued to loose deadly arrows at them, each more ingenious and malevolent than the one before. He dealt with each missile in turn, shooting back a suitable counterattack, but after this had progressed for a while, he began to resent the attacks. It was now no longer a question of escaping with the princesses; it was a matter of Krushan pride. He could keep this up all day, and counter everything Shalva threw at them, but it would encourage the other kings following and give the impression that Shalva harried him all the way to Hastinaga. It was important that he prove his superiority once and for all and end this game. He was incensed by Shalva’s repeated attempts to kill the princesses rather than merely stop Vrath. This was a direct challenge to Vrath’s manhood and family pride: Shalva was effectively saying that he would rather see the girls dead than married to his ward and what the devil was Vrath going to do about that?

The first chance Vrath got, finding an open area with dry baked earth and almost no foliage or tree cover, he turned the chariot around. He did not bother with a wide wheeling arc and a genial approach. He slowed his team, executed a smart turning maneuver, then coaxed them back up to speed and charged directly at Shalva. Before he did this, he had gained a good mile or so on the forerunner. This gave him an excellent approach and he picked up speed as he drove towards his pursuer. He was pleased to see Shalva’s chariot slow as the suitor reacted to the sight of his prey turning upon him, and behind the fore chariot, he saw the other pursuers arriving in quick succession, drawing up their chariots and horses and fanning out in a wide arc to enable a better view of the coming duel. He knew that none of them would interfere, since Shalva had taken first strike and was entitled to the first duel as well. That too was a matter of Krushan warrior code. So long as two champions fought single-handedly, none could interfere, no matter what the outcome. Entire armies sat and watched and waited until champions finished their bout, leaving one dead and the other victorious, and often these duels lasted for hours or days, or even longer—as in the case of poor Gada, who fought his opponent for three years!

Vrath had no intention of letting this bout last more than three minutes.

He saw that Shalva had opted to remain standing while Vrath approached. It was a sensible move. This way, Shalva would presumably have better aim and stability while Vrath, having made the first move, was entitled to take his best shot. Shalva intended to survive this shot and then make his own counterattack against Vrath, this time using the closer range to finish off his targets. Vrath would not give him that chance.

But as Vrath had expected, Shalva deviated from custom. Instead of letting Vrath have the first shot as was traditional in such a situation, he loosed first. This time, he used the advantage of stillness and stability to unleash what must be one of his most powerful weapons.

The princesses screamed in alarm as the javelin-thick arrow shot by Shalva burst into a veritable cloud of arrows. It seemed as if the arrow split and split again and continued to divide itself infinitely, producing an impossible number of missiles that filled the air and darkened the sky itself! Vrath knew that Shalva had used a cannon-bow, an oversized bow fixed to the chariot itself that loosed a container missile as thick as a pole. Within this container missile were the individual barbed arrows, released in stages as the pole split apart during its short flight. Due to the power of the cannon-bow and the relatively lengthy flight time, Shalva was able to loose a second and a third container missile in quick succession, and now, even before the first shower of arrows arrived at its destination, he was loosing a fourth.

A great roar of approval rose from the gathered crowd of princes and kings. Naturally their support was for Shalva, who was fighting for all of them. In Vrath’s view that made all of them equally culpable for Shalva’s actions and transgression of the norms of combat. Even now, what Shalva was doing was unethical in the extreme: It was one thing to use such weapons against superior forces such as a larger army, but to do so against a single warrior enemy, with innocents in harm’s way, that was unacceptable.

“Vrath!” cried Amber, the eldest daughter of Kashya, appealing to him. She was staring up at the approaching cloud of arrows with abject horror. He saw that she expected to die this time. For how could he possibly counter such an attack? Even if he loosed an arrow to stop the first barrage, the second barrage was already following close after—and the third and the fourth and the fifth . . . and Shalva would continue to rain down arrows until his goal was accomplished. It was impossible to escape such an attack in theory and impossible in practice as well . . . for any mortal warrior.

Vrath had adjusted the pace of his charge to match the trajectory of the approaching arrows. He only desired that his horses escape unhurt. They were most innocent of all in this conflict and did not deserve to be injured or killed. He rode until he was certain that the team had passed ahead of the shower of death that rained down from above, then released the reins and turned to the princesses. There was nothing here to fear if the team went off course. The princesses were his only concern now.

Vrath threw himself over all three girls, embracing them tightly, wrapping his arms and legs over them, ensuring that every inch of their bodies was covered by his own. They initially squealed in shock, unaccustomed to any man coming into physical contact with them, but naturally quickly realized he sought only to protect them, and grew still.

The arrows rained down.

Vrath felt them land. They struck the ground, the chariot, and his body. Dozens, scores, hundreds, then it seemed, thousands.

The barrage continued endlessly. The clattering and thudding of arrows as they struck ground and embedded their metal heads in the packed earth, or in the wood of the chariot, or in the flesh of his body, a variety of related sounds that rang out like a death rattle, playing a ghastly dirge. It seemed to go on forever.

Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the rain of arrows ended.

No doubt, Vrath mused through the fog of pain and sensation, Shalva had run out of container missiles. There was a limit to how many he would have been carrying in the limited space of his chariot.

He estimated that Shalva would have loosed at least ten or twelve barrages in all. Perhaps ten or twelve thousand individual missiles. Most of them would have fallen around the chariot. Perhaps a tenth of that number would have fallen on the chariot itself. And of that number perhaps a third would have struck Vrath.

He unwrapped his body from the princesses, regaining his feet. He stumbled and had to reach out for support. He saw Amber’s face as she looked up, staring at him in astonishment. She was staring at his back, his arms, the rear of his neck, his legs . . . She exclaimed in horror, clapping a hand to her mouth. Her sisters simply stared silently in mute disbelief.

Vrath felt as if his back had been set ablaze. He could feel a thousand pinpricks of fire burning into his skin, boring through his flesh, some reaching all the way into his organs, touching upon his bones, penetrating his joints, cracking his spine, his neck, piercing his lungs, his heart, even punching through the soft area at the back of his neck to penetrate his brain-case at two points. It felt like nothing he had ever experienced before: To call it pain would be to understate it woefully. To call it agony would be merely a word. The actual sensation was indescribable, and yet it was also much as the reality suggested. He had been pierced by hundreds of tiny barbed arrows. He knew from the wetness that drenched his back, pouring down the rear of his legs, collecting in a puddle on the floor of the chariot, that he would have been mortally wounded if he were indeed a mortal. In fact, he was probably mortally wounded several score times over. Yet he could still stand, albeit with great effort.

He looked at the face of the eldest daughter of the king of Serapi. Amber lowered her hand from her mouth, still staring at him in utter disbelief, yet assimilating the fact that he still stood, despite his terrible wounds. He saw in her eyes an understanding, an awareness that he could not possibly survive such wounds, no man could, and yet, if he did, then it meant something. It meant he was more than just a man. He saw also that she understood the most important thing: that he had done this to protect her and her sisters. He could have let them die and saved himself—or even if he could not save himself, he still did not need to protect them by using his own body as a shield. Yet by doing so, he had proved one thing beyond dispute: He deserved to decide their fate far more than that treacherous rat of a suitor Shalva who intended to murder his own beloved rather than let her wed another man.

He saw also that she now desired him, Vrath. She was in awe of him. The way she looked at him at that instant was the way he had seen his mother’s followers gaze at her, reverentially, adoringly, devotedly. She looked at him as if he were a god. And she wished to give herself to him.

He shook his head once, silently denying her. She blinked, startled. He did not speak or explain. This was not the time nor the place.

He turned, hearing the gasps of horror from the princesses as they saw his back now and viewed the full extent of his injuries. He knew his back must resemble a porcupine, bristling with arrows. Except that he did not possess the power to simply shoot these arrows from his own body and assault his enemy. He would have to remove them the hard way, by tearing out his own flesh and skin and organ tissue. But that was for later, after he finished the task at hand. For now, he had to deliver a rejoinder to King Shalva, one that he would never forget so long as he lived.

Vrath was relieved to see that the horses were unharmed. He had used those precious seconds to ensure their safety and then the safety of the princesses. He had not cared about himself. He could survive this. He could survive far worse than this, he knew. Although at this instant, with arrows piercing every part of his body, he could not imagine what could be worse.

He coaxed the team into starting forward. They smelled his blood and whinnied angrily, upset. Animals responded well to him, sensing his affinity. He knew they could still smell the river in him, even if mortals could not. It was not a fish smell, but something deeper. An atavistic link to other animals of all species that bonded them at the deepest level.

“Ride,” he urged the beautiful Longrider mares, great powerful glossy giants all of them. “Ride, my beauties! And trust in me.”

They did trust in him. They would ride off the face of a cliff if he commanded them—because he never commanded, merely coaxed, urged, requested, asked lovingly. It was sufficient. When there is a bond of love, even selfish mortal men lay down their lives for one another. Animals? They are born loyal. Dying for one another is part of life for them.

The cheers and roars of approval from the large gathering of watching kings had continued all this while, celebrating what they believed was the extinction of the impudent Krushan abductor and the saving of their honor. It died down now as they saw his chariot pick up speed, resuming its charge directly at the chariot of Shalva. They watched with surprise and renewed interest. He saw many hands raised to point and many voices raised in consternation as they saw the brindled fur coat of arrows he had sprouted.

“Today, in battle, you face Vrath,” he roared, loudly enough to be heard by even the farthest pursuer, still half a mile distant and approaching steadily. “Those of you that survive, return home and tell your kin this tale!”

He saw many of them look at one another in panic, some taking up weapons, others reaching for their reins then dropping them as they realized that flight was useless: They were gathered too closely together to escape easily. Easier to stand and fight. Shalva too was raising a weapon, his longbow again. No doubt he intended to demonstrate some new ingenious kind of arrow.

Time now to use his powers as a demi-god to the fullest. No reason to hold back if the mortal pursuing was himself resorting to magical weaponry.

Vrath uttered the mantras he had learned when still a boy, the ones he had been taught in the heart of the deepest ocean, where the sun had not shone for untold years and where only one god ruled supreme. Vrrun. It had been Vrrun-Tau himself who had taught Vrath the mantra, back when he was still the prince-heir to all his family, friends, and gurus. Vrrun had taught him the arts of fighting war in watery environments, arts which Vrath later realized he might never have occasion to put into practice during his life as a mortal on dry earth. But some of what Vrrun taught him was applicable on land or sea or sky.

Like this mantra, and he used it now.

In response to the mantra, a bow appeared instantly in his hands. The moment it appeared, a thunderclap sounded in the clear sky, deafeningly loud. The bow itself was immense, the size of a lance from tip to tip, and the only way it could be held was by standing it on the floor of the chariot. Even so, it towered above him. The texture of the bow itself was not wood but water, for it was made of water held in solid form; not ice, but simply water held rigid by the power of the mantra. The arrow that appeared, accompanied by a flash of lightning, was white as the lightning itself. It was made of densely packed ocean salt, as hard as lohitwood and as heavy. Hard enough to penetrate armor and bone and punch through flesh with the same impact as any wooden missile. Yet when it penetrated flesh, it would dissolve to its natural state, filling the wound with pungent ocean saline.

He was within a hundred yards of Shalva’s chariot now and could see Shalva berating his charioteer. The charioteer was panicking, and in the confusion, their horses were rolling their eyes and whickering restlessly, unnerved by the thunderclaps and Vrath’s chariot, which was bearing down on them at relentless speed. Vrath loosed the first arrow from Runya’s bow and watched it slash through the reins and rigging of the team. Freed of their harnessing, the horses milled about a moment, then realized they were free and began to race away.

The chariot itself settled to the ground with a rude thump, spilling the charioteer out and onto the ground where he sprawled.

Shalva shouted with anger and raised his bow again to fire back at Vrath. He loosed an arrow which spread into a wall of fire that raged towards Vrath’s horses. The team whinnied, unable to control their natural terror of fire, but Vrath’s next arrow turned to water, dousing the wall of fire before it could come close enough to harm his horses.

What followed then was a humiliation and a rout.

Vrath snapped Shalva’s bow with his next shot. Then shattered his chariot wheels.

Turning around Shalva’s chariot, he rode in a circle, firing inwards at the suitor, demolishing his chariot piece by piece. Each time Shalva attempted to raise a weapon—an axe, a sword, a spear, a javelin, another bow—Vrath destroyed it with a single shot.

Soon, Shalva lay on the ground, the ruins of his chariot around him. He beat his chest and slapped his arms in anger, challenging Vrath to do his worst.

Vrath ripped the man’s clothes off, rendering him naked for all to see.

Then he sliced off his moustaches and hair, turning him bald-faced and bare-headed.

Then, unleashing an arrow that turned in mid-flight into a storm of tiny birds, he pinned Shalva down on the ground, arms and legs spread akimbo, naked and bald and helpless.

The suitor of Amber cried out with shame and humiliation and begged Vrath to kill him.

Instead, Vrath turned on the watching kings. They had stayed to watch Shalva’s humiliation, unable to look away from the denigration of one of their own rivals. The truth was, while they had cheered on Shalva earlier, he had been the prime contender at the swayamvara and most likely to have his pick of the princesses. That earned him a great deal of animosity. So long as he was victorious, they cheered him. Now, they jeered instead, and applauded Vrath’s skill at arms and extraordinary ability.

But their jeers did not last long.

When Vrath turned his bow on them, they quailed with fear. At once, those that were expecting this loosed their own volley of arrows. Another storm of missiles shot towards Vrath. But this time, he had time enough to counter. He shot a single arrow that exploded with a blinding blue flash in midair. So powerful was the explosion, the hail of arrows was shattered into fragments which were in turn driven back at the kings who had loosed the arrows. Thrice each king was pierced by his own arrows, and cried out in agony as he fell to the ground or to the floor of his chariot, clutching his wounds.

Those who remained unharmed applauded Vrath’s skill nervously, hoping they would be spared his wrath. They were. Vrath did not harm those who did not attempt to harm him.

Then Vrath turned the heads of his horse team and rode away, heading towards Hastinaga.

This time, he was not followed.

8

After travelling for the rest of that day, Vrath and the princesses stopped to make camp for the night. The princesses had been silent after the battle with their suitors, although they held one another close and averted their eyes from Vrath’s terrible, terrible wounds.

Once they had a fire going and had eaten the game Vrath hunted for them, and the horses had been watered, fed and groomed, Vrath asked Amber’s help in removing the arrows from his body. She agreed readily. It was a long and painful process, the worse for him, of course, but no less for her, because she could feel the pulling and tearing of each barbed head as she teased and worked it free of his flesh. His wounds began to bleed again and soon the grass beneath his body was soaked with his blood. She began to weep then, unable to help herself. He turned his head to look at her but did not say anything at that time. After a brief respite, she regained control of her emotions and resumed her work. It was late, the night was quiet, the moon was high, and her sisters were asleep when she finished. The pile of arrows lying on the ground was half a yard high. It was impossible to imagine that they had all been embedded in his flesh only hours earlier.

And yet, even as she washed the last of his wounds clean under his direction, she saw that the first ones, the ones from which she had first removed the arrows, were already closed and starting to heal. It was remarkable. She had never seen the likes of it before. Clearly, his ability to endure pain and injury and to recover successfully from them was beyond human measure. The fact that he could still sit, stand, move, and talk was in itself a miracle.

He thanked her quietly and was about to turn over and sleep when she spoke.

“Great Krushan,” she said, still too self-conscious of his stature to call him by his name directly. She was a princess born and raised; she could not overlook protocol and etiquette, even under the circumstances. Besides, for all his actions, he was still very much a gentleman and a royal, as was she. “I had already chosen the king of Soubha as my husband to be. He had accepted me and made his desire known to my father. It also pleased my father to have him as his son-in-law. Once he excelled at the swayamvara, I would have declared him as my choice of husband. But now I can never do so. This is your doing. You appear to be a man who knows Krushan. Therefore I ask that you decide what is the right course of action for me to follow under Krushan law.”

So saying, she went to bed beside her sisters. But she did not fall asleep at once. Instead, she lay awake, hoping that Vrath would come to her and answer her proposal in words or deed, or both.

Vrath lay on his pallet of grass and thought long and hard on her words. He knew what she meant but could not say more directly. You have defeated the man whom I intended to marry. By defeating him and proving yourself the better man, you earn the right to claim my hand. It would not displease me if you declare your intention to marry me.

He knew that she was awake yet, sighing and turning from side to side in order to let him know that she waited for his answer. He knew she meant for him to come and claim her. She desired him and wanted him to desire her as his wife.

In another life, at another time, perhaps he would have done as she wished. Perhaps he would have wished the same.

But in this life, he was foresworn from marriage, cohabitation, love, sex . . . and that meant he could not allow himself even to feel such desires for a woman, let alone express them. To him, the line between celibate and homemaker was not a fine one. It was clearly etched, large and bold. And he could not approach it even from afar, let alone broach it.

Moments later, he woke Amber with a hand on her shoulder.

9

She started awake at once, beaming with pleasure. For she thought he had come to steal her away into the shadows to demonstrate his desire for her. She was excited and awaiting it eagerly. Never before had she desired a man as she desired Vrath. Even Shalva’s proposal and her infatuation for him seemed juvenile and puerile now in retrospect. This was a real man, and real love. And under the circumstances, what could be more thrilling than to give herself under the stars to a prince of the Krushan empire after being abducted from her own swayamvara? It was like being the heroine of her own puranic fable.

What she failed to remember was that the heroines of puranic fables almost always found their stories ending tragically.

Vrath took her around the trees to where the horses were tethered. Her heart was pounding and she found her breath catching in her throat as she prepared to receive the touch of her first lover. She was surprised to see that he had separated a horse from the team and had saddled and harnessed it for individual riding. She was even more surprised when he turned to her and said, “This horse will carry you to your destination. Ride southwards and westwards and you will find your way.”

She stared at him blankly. Southwards and westwards? What did he mean? Then she remembered what kingdom lay in that direction.

“Shouba?” she asked. “You are sending me to Shouba?”

It was impossible to see his face clearly in the shadows of the tree. “It is what you desire, is it not? You were all but betrothed to King Shalva of Shouba. I am doing the right thing under Krushan law, as you requested. Your two sisters will continue to Hastinaga with me, to be married to my ward Virya. They shall be treated as princesses deserve and shall be as happy with him as they could ever desire. He is a handsome young man and a good king. They will not lack for anything and shall live as queens of the earth.”

She was still trying to get over the shock of disappointment. “But . . . you do not wish me to go as well . . . to Hastinaga?”

“Two wives are good,” he said. “And yes, had you not asked me to release you, I would wish you to go to Hastinaga as well. To wed Virya. But since you asked for my mercy, I am granting you this reprieve. I wish I could let your sisters go as well, but trust me when I say, I am sure they will do far better with Virya than with any of those that hoped to win your hearts at the swayamvara.”

She did not know what to say. This was an unexpected turn of events. Clearly, he had misunderstood her, or . . . Or he had deliberately rejected her overture and invitation, spurning her. Why else would he send her to that naked blubbering fool? That coward who had tried to kill her and her sisters to prove his own valor as a warrior and had then proved himself utterly incompetent before a real warrior like Vrath. She didn’t want to go to Shalva now! She had no desire to see Shalva ever again. Yet she seemed to have no choice. She could not refuse to go now, for it would be humiliating to beg him and be rejected again.

She made one last attempt. He was turning to go and she reached out and caught his arm. He stopped and looked down at her hand holding his forearm.

“Will you not take me?” she asked, leaving it open for him to interpret in any way he pleased. To say more would be to say too much, and that would mean a loss of dignity. For a princess raised as she had been, dignity was more important than anything else.

He reached down and removed her hand from his forearm, gently. “I cannot,” he said, and as the legend grew over time, its narrators would claim there was a hint—just a hint, mind you—of regret in his tone, “My own vow forbids it.”

To which he added softly: “Goodbye, princess.”

10

Amber left in tears, riding hard.

Vrath lay awake, after, and looked up at the stars, listening to the sound of the hooves fading into the night. And none knew what he felt in that moment, except perhaps the stars that looked down upon him, as cold and inscrutable as the son of Jeel and Sha’ant himself.

©2019 by Ashok K. Banker.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ashok K. Banker is the author of more than sixty books, including the internationally acclaimed Ramayana series. His works have all been bestsellers in India and have sold around the world. His latest novel is the first in a new epic fantasy series, Upon a Burning Throne. He lives in Los Angeles.

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

Those Are Pearls

Kat Howard | 2525 words

Elaine broke her curse like a mirror, heedless of the shards that scattered across the floor. The guests at the party laughed, applauded, whooped with delight at her reckless abandon. She offered them an exaggerated curtsy, holding the pose as she held their eyes, reveling in their gaze, in the simple pleasure of being seen.

The broken pieces of the curse slid into liquid, shimmering like mercury before fogging into smoke and disappearing. A minor curse, to be gotten rid of so easily. Nothing that had grown thorns and teeth. Nothing that had developed a craving for breath or blood.

Color high in her cheeks, Elaine plucked a glass of champagne from a passing server and drank. Her laughter was as bright and sharp as the bubbles, as sparkling as the crowd that surrounded her, all of them here to celebrate her freedom.

Her guests traded stories as they drank and danced, reminiscing about their own curses—ah, yes, sleeping does tend to run in families; certainly it is painful for words to turn to diamonds in your mouth, but when it was over I had them made into this tiara—and the breaking of them. They marked their relief at being past such things with every clink of glass upon glass.

They would drink until their memories were replaced with a shining haze. Until their own curses were nothing more than half-remembered shadows, until they could look at their tiaras without remembering the taste of blood and saliva as the diamonds fell from their lips.

Glass in hand, I left the too-bright room, the aggressive celebration. Happy as I was for my sister, that room wasn’t mine.

Curses can be lingering things.

• • • •

My own curse was silence. It’s common enough, particularly for girls. We’re so often encouraged not to speak, and that practiced quiet makes it easy for a curse to steal our voices.

Because silence is one of the traditional curses, there are a plethora of known ways to break it: I could weave or sew a certain number of shirts out of some material rough enough to cut my hands and stain the fabric with my blood, all without weeping. I could endure a loveless relationship for a year and a day. I could perform some tremendously useless task: find one incorrectly sorted seed in a barrel of its near-identical cousins and nurse the plant to flowering, my voice to return with its blooming.

There are traditions. Established guidelines. The curse falls, you purchase the way of breaking it, you move on. That is what is done. Expected. Traditional.

Safe.

And in that safety, the seeds of the second curse. To have a voice only when it is given, only after asking nicely, following the rules. So I decided to break my curse myself.

It wasn’t the done thing, but it wasn’t impossible. I could afford to be eccentric, and people don’t mind a curiosity, so long as she’s quiet about it.

• • • •

“I don’t know why you were worried that something would go wrong.” Elaine stood in front of her mirror and rubbed at her eyes, smudging the memories of the party into her faded eyeliner.

“Curses aren’t always easy to see in their true form. They lie and twist things around, and if you don’t break them fully you might not notice what’s left until it’s too late.”

“You worry too much, Rose.” She brushed her lips against my cheek then yawned so hugely I heard her jaw crack. “Good night.”

• • • •

I worried just the right amount.

You’ll see them sometimes, people with pieces of their curses still clinging to them. Half-transformed into birds—taloned feet and feathers instead of hair—or with snakes slithering through their teeth along with their words. And then it gets worse, until there is nothing left but a sad-eyed bird that doesn’t quite understand wings, a knot of serpents, a pool of silence in the shape of a girl.

Curses, if not properly broken, put roots into your blood and bones until you are nothing but a garden of misfortunes.

• • • •

Elaine acted as if she’d never been cursed. That’s tradition, too. When it’s over, there’s no need to look back.

But in the days after the party, mirrors began to appear. Logical places at first—windows silvered over and offered reflection rather than transparency. Puddles became glass underfoot.

“There’s something different, though,” Elaine said, looking from our images in the shop window to the passing street behind us. “Look.”

I stopped and stood next to her. Sister dark and sister fair. She was right. The reflected colors of her clothing were wrong, faded somehow. She wore an eye-catching blaze of red, but it looked barely pink, and she was nearly transparent.

“So strange,” she said. “I’m almost gone, but you look the same. Maybe it’s just the angle.” Elaine smiled at her reflection and kept walking.

I looked at the mirror slantwise, my gaze unfocused, searching for the haze of a curse. Nothing. But as I turned away the glass seemed to alter, to shimmer like liquid, like mercury. I froze then shook my head. Only a window again.

• • • •

Most people only ever notice the manifestation of the curse. You know that your sister has fallen into an unwakeable sleep, that your brother speaks only truth, no matter how brutal, and those things are enough.

But each curse has a shape.

This is what a curse looks like: a necklace of thorns, bright against a throat, sharp enough to open a vein.

To break it, you see that the curse is water, and you drink it deep.

Or a curse may look like a vine of ivy, lush and green, roots almost unseen but hooked like claws beneath the skin.

You make yourself salt and ashes, inhospitable ground.

A curse may bind you, like a gag of shadows.

And your words are knives, cutting through.

• • • •

All at once the mirrors, like curses, were broken. They did not return to what they had been before, windows and water and other, more usual things, just sat cracked in their stolen frames.

“It’s creepy, seeing yourself in pieces like that,” Elaine said, gaze averted from her shattered reflection. “Someone should clean this up.”

I reached a hand out, wanting one of the fractioned pieces of glass, then yanked it back, hissing. “It’s sharp. Like teeth.” Drops of blood welled on my finger. “Maybe that’s why no one has cleaned it up.”

“Ugh.” Elaine shuddered. “I like it even less now.”

The sensation of the mirror’s teeth reaching for me lingered. I didn’t like it at all.

• • • •

When a curse is broken, nothing of it remains. It’s swept away with the faded party decorations, poured out with the flat champagne.

It’s tradition not to talk about it, no matter what the curse was. To never ask someone what it was like to be shifted out of their shape every full moon, to be winged and feathered, to be unseen.

To not tell anyone what it felt like to be strangled by your own words. To drown on unspoken poetry filling your lungs. To taste every silenced hello and goodbye like grit on your tongue.

All gone. Except for the memory.

Most people will not see you if you cannot speak. When I was cursed, I was ignored, shoved aside, treated as if I didn’t exist.

Elaine made a point of carrying paper, so I could still talk to her, after a fashion. She asked me questions, as if expecting an answer. She said hello when she saw me. She said I love you.

My curse breaking was the sound of locks flinging open. It was shadows falling away and ropes unraveling.

I wrote down all of the things I would have said. Every word, every shout, every hesitation. I unsilenced myself, writing each unspoken thing over and over until the pages were covered in my unheard voice.

I lit the pages on fire, giving my words air the only way I could.

And I spoke.

My voice was a rusted hinge, so quiet I thought for a moment that I had done something wrong, that instead of breaking the curse, I had bound myself in it forever. My heart clenched around the thought that I could have been safe, that I should have asked nicely. There were reasons for the traditions, and I was no better than anyone who had followed them. I should have known.

Then I realized the weeping, howling animal sounds I heard were my own.

• • • •

“I think something went wrong,” Elaine said.

“Wrong how?”

“With my curse.”

Elaine’s curse had been invisibility. Again, a common one, with well-established traditions. Quests were the usual thing in this circumstance—finding someone to fall in love with her, or to speak to her achievements, rather than her physical beauty. Instead, she captured her reflection in a mirror and then shattered it.

She held the sliver of glass out to me. “When I broke it, it didn’t all disappear.”

“This is the original curse?” I asked. “From weeks ago?”

She nodded.

I took the glass from her. It was cool, like water in my hand, a blur across its surface as if some part of Elaine’s reflection still colored it. “Why didn’t you say anything before?”

“I didn’t want to give it up. Being invisible. Not all the way. I wanted there to be times when I could just walk around, just exist, and not have to be looked at. I thought if I kept part of it, if I just let a little of it stay, it wouldn’t be a curse anymore, and that could happen.” She closed her eyes. “Stupid, I know.”

“Why show me now? If you’ve had that piece of it the whole time, why decide now that something is wrong?”

“Look at yourself in the glass.”

“Elaine, I am not using a curse to check my reflection.”

“Pick another mirror, then. Any of them.”

I stood before the mirror in the corner of my room. I could see everything in it. Except for my sister, and myself.

• • • •

There are rituals. Traditions. A curse, once broken, breaks easier a second time. Death becomes one hundred years of sleep, becomes one thousand and one nights telling stories. We know what our curses are when we see them, and we know their undoing.

But there is a catch. We may know how to break curses, but they know how to bind us in the first place.

• • • •

It wasn’t just our mirrors that were affected, but all of them, everywhere. No matter who gazed into them, no reflection showed. It was as if everyone had turned invisible.

“I hate it,” Elaine said. “I look in the mirror and it’s as if I’m a ghost in my own house. And the worst part of it is, everyone looks at me now. They know the mirrors are my fault because they know what my curse looked like, and so they stare. They don’t even pretend not to. I can’t be seen when I want to be, and no one will stop looking.

“I wish they knew what it felt like, to always be stared at.”

• • • •

After I learned how to see my own curse, I discovered that I could see other people’s, too. It wasn’t difficult—once you know that something is there, know the way you need to look to make it visible, it’s more effort to ignore it. Seeing the curses, understanding them, had the same sort of pleasure as fitting pieces into a puzzle. I liked the small click.

And what I could see, I could break.

It didn’t take long after I broke my own curse for word to get out, for people to come to me for ways of undoing when their own curses fell. My methods were of interest at parties, and besides, it was easier to listen to me explain how to slip off shoes of red-hot iron than to walk until they were worn through.

I had seen Elaine’s curse, too. Tiny mirrors, strung together like bracelets and a necklace, a matching set, reflecting only her face. I would have unstrung them carefully, one by one, rather than smashing them to pieces—bad luck to break a mirror.

But she wanted to break the curse herself, and who was I to judge her for that? I loved my sister, so I did not tell her to be safe, and hoped for good luck.

• • • •

The piece of her curse was missing from my room. I went looking for Elaine to see if she had taken it back, to try to undo that final tiny bit herself.

She was looking out her window, a window that was transparent as expected. Across the wall, the edge of her—shoulder and elbow and thick curls of hair— reflected in her mirror.

“Elaine?”

She turned to me, and I saw myself, perfectly reflected in the mirrors of her eyes.

• • • •

This is what is means, to break your own curse. It means knowing what the curse is. Not how it manifests, not why it fell upon you rather than some other, not what people say it means, that such a curse has chosen you. It means seeing it truly, recognizing the truth at its red and bloody heart.

And so, it means knowing your own red and bloody heart as well.

• • • •

I repeated her name and closed my eyes. Seeing myself looking back instead of Elaine looking out was an ache.

“You worry too much, Rose,” she said. “I’m fine.”

“How?”

“It’s not a curse. Look.”

It took an effort to open my eyes to meet the mirrors of hers, to confront myself, reflected back. I stepped closer, looked sideways, walked around my sister while she stood, perfectly calm.

No hook, no thorns, no sharp edges or claws. No trace of the curse that the transformation had come from.

“They can look all they want now. All they’ll see is themselves.”

She looked, I thought, happy. I closed my eyes again so hers wouldn’t reflect my tears.

• • • •

We don’t talk about how the curses happen. We grow up knowing that certain curses run in families, that boys get cursed into monstrosity and girls into sleep, and we leave it at that. It is easier to imagine that our curses simply fall on us like shadows, inevitable at certain times, rather than to acknowledge the unseen truth: Someone, somewhere, sets them in motion.

If you know the heart of a curse, you can break it. If you know the heart of a person, you can give them a curse that thinks it’s a blessing.

We don’t talk about the memories, and we imagine that silence is the final act in the curse’s disappearance. In our hearts, we know that’s not true. There is always something left.

I hugged my sister hard. In my finger, tiny slivers of a mirror, like small biting teeth, pressed against the inside of my skin.

©2015 by Kat Howard. Originally published in Guillotine. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kat Howard is the author of the novels Roses and Rot and the Alex Award-winning An Unkindness of Magicians. Her short fiction collection, A Cathedral of Myth and Bone, is now out from Saga Press and she’s writing The Books of Magic for Vertigo Comics. Her novella, The End of the Sentence, co-written with Maria Dahvana Headley, was an NPR Best Book of the Year in 2014. She currently lives in New Hampshire, where she is working on her next projects.

Of Love and Other Monsters

Vandana Singh | 21205 words

When I think about him, I remember a wave I watched near a beach once, a big, beautiful, smooth wave, perfectly rounded, like molten glass. It came into a narrow channel from the open sea, muscular and purposeful, hardly breaking into surf. I thought it would climb all the way up the end of the channel, wash over me, and carry on, unbroken, till it crossed the entire Deccan peninsula. But it met the sand, rolled over it, little traceries of white disturbing its smooth, translucent aspect. Touched my toes, broke up into little tongues of froth, and dissipated. So I like to think of him—Sankaran, I mean—like a wave that came out of the ocean for a while to fulfill some purpose (whatever that was). Then he was lost to me.

Physicists have a name for that kind of wave. It is very unusual, and it is called a soliton, or solitary wave.

When, as a young man, I met Sankaran for the first time, I thought he was the one I had been searching for all my conscious life. But as the poet Faiz says, there are more sorrows in the world than love. As soon as I had settled into a certain youthful complacency, the world and its attendant sorrows got in the way.

The study of minds, soliton-like or otherwise, is my particular passion. Mindsensing, mind-weaving—these extraordinary abilities set me apart from other people. I like to go into a gaggle of housewives bargaining over turnips or a crowd at a cricket match. I drift about, trying to determine what kind of entity the crowd has the potential to become. I take the embryological possibility of the meta-mind, make a joining here, a parting there; I wave my baton like the conductor of an orchestra and sense a structure, a form, coalesce in the interactions of these knots of persons. The meta-mind I construct has a vague unity of purpose, a jumble of contradictory notions, and even a primitive self-awareness.

Which is why I am so disturbed by solitons. They walk into a meta-mind as though nothing were there, and they walk out, unaffected. They give nothing, nor do they take away.

Such was Sankaran-with-stars-in-his-eyes, Sankaran the astronomer. This is not his story, however—his is just one thread in the tapestry, one voice in the telling. This is my story, and it begins when I was (so I am told) seventeen years old.

• • • •

The first thing I remember is fire. The next thing: a pair of big, strong hands stroking and kneading me. A woman’s voice, saying, “Come now, be so, be still . . .” I was lying on a bed of warm ash, with sharp bits digging into my back.

I have no recollection of my life before the conflagration took my memory and identity. What I am now began with fire, with a woman called Janani, on a summer night in the remote outskirts of a small town in eastern India. Some time later, when I came to my senses, the stars were out, and the air smelled of roasted coriander seeds and cow dung, as it does most nights over there. I was lying on a cot in the little yard behind Janani’s shack. Everything, including my lean, dark body, was unfamiliar to me.

My rescuer, Janani—a widow who ran a toddy shop—took me in and helped me face my predicament. The first thing she did after I recovered was to give me a name: Arun, which (like everything in those early days) sounded strange to me. “It means ‘red,’” she told me. “You were born of fire.” In those days I could sense the ghost of my past self very faintly: I saw symbols, words, numbers, shapes, as though scratched in damp clay. “Who am I? What happened to me in the fire?” I asked her. My voice sounded rasping and unfamiliar. The Hindi syllables felt strange on my tongue, but the words were there in my mind, waiting for me.

“I cannot tell you,” she said. “There was a fire in an abandoned building, and I rescued you. You are not a local. That’s all there is to know.”

Without an identity, I had nowhere to go, no family. Nobody in the area recognized me. So Janani gave me a home. I slept in the front of her hut, which was the toddy shop. Oh, the strangeness of those days!

It was like learning to live again. She had to show me how to take a twig from the neem tree behind the hut and use it like a toothbrush. I learned how to use a toilet, how to chop onions, how to talk to customers. Janani made a living not just from selling toddy but also by dispensing herbs for ailments from stomachaches to unrequited love, and I had to learn the lore enough to know which bottle to bring out when she asked for it. I had to learn to recognize my own face in the mirror—I would stand before the little mirror on the wall and pull faces until she yelled at me, “Arun, you fool! Did I pull you out of the fire so you could admire your beauty all day?” And she would set me to work washing glasses or chopping herbs. The ghost of my past self stayed in the shadows of my mind, and I found myself thinking less and less of what my old life might have been. At that time all was new, strange, and endlessly fascinating—not least of which was my ability to sense minds.

• • • •

I was idle by nature and by the nature of my ability, which was distracting to say the least. Janani insisted on educating me; from her I learned my letters and arithmetic, which seemed to come very easily to me. She also got a retired clerk who frequented the tea shack nearby to teach me a little about history, geography, and the rudiments of the English language. I would have liked nothing better than to loiter all day in the marketplace, but Janani’s sharp tongue kept me at my chores and lessons, at least until her back was turned. She was stocky and strong; she moved with the cadence of a large, slow river, sweeping up everything in her path. Her customers, work-worn laborers and ne’er-do-wells, feared her and confided their woes to her. Only once did I see her take a man into the dark room behind the shop where she slept. After several hours he came out, staggering, smiled vaguely at me, handed me a ten-rupee note, and left. He never came back.

My favorite place, where I learned and practiced what I considered to be my art, was the market; here the vendors squatted on the ground before their baskets full of gourds, peppers, eggplants, and onions, shouting, “Rob me! Loot me! Only three rupees a kilo!” I grew to appreciate the sweaty housewives with their glinting eyes, their bright saris hitched up in readiness for battle as they began insulting the produce. Pride, honor, and desire amidst the tottering, shining piles of luscious fruits and vegetables—how could I resist? I sensed the convoluted topography of each mind, its hills, valleys, areas of light and darkness, the whole animal mass trembling and shifting with emotional fluxes. After some practice I was able to draw the minds into a kind of net, to weave the separate threads of jangling thought processes into—not a tapestry, I was never that skilled, but a jumble of knitting wool, such as a kitten might do. There was little awareness among the separate minds that they were, at this point in space and time, tentatively the members of a rather confused meta-mind—how many cells in your body, but for a specialized few, are aware of themselves as part of a higher consciousness?

I once tried to draw Janani into a meta-mind with a couple of her customers, but she came into the back of her shop and cuffed me. “Don’t you try that on me, you good-for-nothing! Is this how you repay me?” I had already guessed (from the fact that nobody had tried it on me and that my subjects seemed to be so unaware of what I was doing) that this ability of mine was unique, but I didn’t know that Janani knew I had it. Later she explained that she did not possess my ability—indeed, she had come across only one other person who did—but she was a sensitive. She could tell when someone, especially a crude beginner like me, was trying tricks.

“Who’s this other person?” I asked, intrigued.

“You don’t need to know anything about him,” she told me. “Just somebody I met once. He wasn’t a nice man.”

She wouldn’t tell me more. But I realized then that the world was more complex than I’d thought; at least one other person had my peculiar talent, most didn’t, and some could sense my mind reaching out to theirs.

I spent all my spare time wandering about the narrow green lanes of my neighborhood under the gulmohar trees, scuffing up soft, silken dust with my bare toes. In the muddy by-lanes I gambled at marbles with other boys and gawked with them over the calendar of dewy-eyed film stars hanging in the neighborhood tea shack. I learned about sex and desire by watching the pariah dogs in the streets and the way the older boys looked at the unreachable, uniformed schoolgirls passing by with pigtails swinging. My own longings were nebulous. I could look at the tea seller’s daughter—a sloe-eyed vixen with a sharp tongue and a ready vocabulary of swear words—and tell that underneath it all was a mind as fragile as a spider’s web, tense with fear and need. I felt drawn to her, but then there was also the barber, a thin, clean-shaven young fellow, shy and subdued to all appearances. He distracted me every time I passed the place where he had set up shop: a mirror hung on a wall by the street with a chair in front of it, where he sat his customers down and ministered to their heads or beards. His mind was luscious, imaginative, erotic; I could not read his thoughts, but I could sense the nature of them: Desire flowed with the rise and fall of his fingers, the shy caress of his hands on the cheek of a customer. Both my mind and body responded to the needs of such men and women around me; sometimes I would get aroused simply walking down the street, feeling the brush of their minds like feathers on my skin. Due to the crowded, public nature of our lives and the narrowness of convention, there was little hope of physical consummation—only the occasional groping in dark alleyways among us boys—but I could reach out with my mind and make a bridge, a connection as tangible to me as a touch. Most did not have the ability to sense this, but once the tea seller’s daughter looked up at me, startled, her eyes as clear and honest as a small child’s, as though she, too, had felt the electricity between our minds. Then her habitual aloofness slipped over her face like a mask, and the moment was gone.

There was a game I liked to play: I would lie on the broad branch of a large neem tree that grew near the tea shop, close my eyes, and try to guess who was passing below me from their mind-signature. If the person was a stranger, the mind-signature told me nothing of their identity, not even if they were male or female—but a well-known person was like the familiar topography of the street you grew up on.

Despite my persistent questions, Janani refused to tell me about the other person she knew who had my ability. “I hope you never meet him,” she would say with a shudder.

Then one night he found me.

I had just finished sweeping out the shop when I sensed something odd, as though a tendril had insinuated itself into my mind; at the same time I became aware that there was someone outside the door, just standing and waiting in the darkness. Janani must have felt it, too, because she looked at me in sudden apprehension. I felt the tug of a mind far more sophisticated than my own, pulling me into the labyrinths of its own consciousness like a fisherman drawing in his line. I got up and began walking toward the front of the shop as if in a dream. Janani, who was obviously less affected than I, grabbed me and pushed me out the back door, into the quiet darkness of her vegetable garden. “Arun, you fool, get out of here!” she whispered fiercely against my cheek. I willed myself to put one foot before another. I climbed across the bamboo fence. Every step I took made me stronger and more able to resist.

When I returned, Janani was sitting on the shop floor, rocking to and fro. Her hair was unkempt, her sari crumpled, and she kept saying, “Rama, oh, Rama,” in a soft monotone. A great wave of anger and fear swept over me.

“Who was that? What did he do?”

“That was Rahul Moghe. The only other person I know who has your talent. He is dangerous, and he wants you, God knows for what terrible purpose. You must avoid him. You will know him not by his appearance, which can be deceptive, but by the way he drags at your mind without warning.

“He has threatened me. Now this place is no longer safe for either of us. I must think what to do . . .”

• • • •

That was the first and only time Janani took me to her bed, to the comfort of her dark, Himalayan breasts that smelled of cloves and cinnamon. She was like an earthquake and a tidal wave rolled into one. Afterward, I heard her mutter to herself, “Surely it doesn’t matter with him; he’s different . . .” In the morning she flung me summarily out of her bed and began to pack.

“This is a sign that we must part ways. I have taught you what I can. You will go out into the world and make something of yourself, and keep away from Moghe. I have some money I have been saving for you. Meanwhile I will sell this place and go live with a friend in Rishikesh. Keep in touch with me, because I want to know how you are faring. I have some of your things in a safe place. I will send them to you when I can.”

“What things?”

“Things from before the fire. Don’t worry about it now. You must go to the next town and get a job. I know a place . . .”

Which is how I found myself living in a tiny room over a tailor’s shop in the neighboring town. It was a tranquil time for me. I helped the tailor with deliveries, and after a while he made me a pair of pants and a shirt so I could look like a respectable young man instead of a drifter with holes in his clothes. Eventually (prompted by a barrage of letters from Janani) I got a job as a clerk at a computer training institute. Here my quick brain and my lessons with Janani and the old clerk paid off; over the next year I improved my English and began to help the system administrator with computer maintenance work. The work was enjoyable and came to me easily.

“Arun, foolish one,” Janani wrote. “You are no longer a street waif with few prospects. Here is your chance to make something of yourself. I’m sending money for classes. Learn computers and get a proper job; every idiot is doing it.” So I registered for a couple of classes and found that I had a knack for programming. Numbers, symbols, instructions, logic—it was as though I had once known this, or something like this, in my old life. Encouraged by the students, who looked upon me as a project of their own, I began to study full-time. Although I had no formal education and was unused to discipline, I made progress with their help. In the hot, dusty little classrooms with the squeaky ceiling fans and traffic sounds from the open windows, I was able to shut out other minds and concentrate. Slowly I began to write, decipher, and debug computer code. In a few months, other students were asking me for help. My life changed.

Back in my bare little room, I would lie on my sagging bed and listen to the voices from the shop below, the lulling rhythm of the sewing machines, and play at making meta-minds. “Arun,” I would tell myself, “in two years you’ve come a long way.” But my laziness, held at bay by the unaccustomed intellectual stimulation, reasserted itself eventually. Instead of pursuing a full degree, I opted for a mere diploma, which greatly disappointed Janani as well as some of my teachers.

But the change in my life, in this short, intense period, had opened me up to the possibilities of the world. I read voraciously in Hindi and English, learning about foreign countries and customs, and the wars and plagues of history. From lurid Hindi science fiction to paperback English romances, there was nothing that was not grist for my mill. I came to realize that sensing other minds through the written word was almost as interesting a skill as my unique, innate ability to sense them directly. Writing—whether English or Hindi or computer code—was the key that opened the doors to other minds, other lands. Like a monk on leave from the monastery, I was agape with wonder. For the first time I realized that there were many ways to be a foreigner; losing one’s memory, being poor, being illiterate, were just some of them.

• • • •

Meanwhile I continued to get letters and packages from Janani. She was now a seamstress in Rishikesh. She wrote that she was gradually retrieving and returning my things, such as they were, from before the fire. The things made no sense. There were some photographs that she had apparently taken herself: a great, dazzling wall of flame, an enormous log in the foreground, glowing with the heat. Pieces of abstract ceramic sculpture, remains of etchings. Had I been an artist? There was nothing remotely artistic about me now. I looked at my hands, my body, clean and healed by Janani’s ministrations. I did not even have any scars. I looked at the other photos she had sent of teenage boys looking into the camera. One of them was me. The others looked vaguely familiar. Had they been my friends in that unknown life?

But I was too busy with my new life to pay much attention to my erstwhile possessions. Not long after receiving my diploma, I got a job checking software for defects and moved to the great, crowded metropolis of New Delhi. Janani was ecstatic. “A great step up in the world, Arun!” she wrote, exulting. And in many ways it was so. Flush with success—the job was easy for me and not too demanding—and with a new sense of my place in the world, I settled down in my new life. It was during this time that I began to explore my extraordinary mental abilities in a more methodical manner.

One of my early discoveries was that there were minds that were completely closed to me, different from the kind of mental resistance I’d felt with Janani. There were people who would be standing with the crowd outside the cricket stadium, apparently as excited about the impending match as anybody else, but they did not register on my radar. I was greatly troubled by such minds—blanks, I called them. I feared and distrusted them. It seemed that my skill had its limitations. But the solitons were different. I sensed them all right, but I could not draw them in. Their minds moved through my jumbled meta-mind the way a man walks through a large, empty field on his way home. Quickly, cleanly, with his attention elsewhere. Taking nothing, leaving nothing behind.

The first one I experienced was at a rally at the Red Fort in Delhi. The prime minister was up on the ramparts in a bulletproof box, speechifying about the latest war. Seventeen thousand people with nothing better to do—college students, farmers with harvests lost in the drought, clerks on their way to important errands, unemployable sons of rich men and other wastrels, street people and pickpockets—had been rounded up by the party men. As the prime minister’s rhetoric became more passionate, I sensed the minds, at first relaxed and disjointed like a bunch of loose rubber bands, becoming like angry bees buzzing in concert. Not very interesting—too simple, but also dangerous. I put my hands over my ears, but I could not shut them out; it was as though I were being blinded and deafened at the same time. Stumbling away through the crowd, I was pushed and cursed as I pressed on. And the realization hit: The meta-mind had formed of its own accord. I had not done it. That is why I couldn’t make it stop. What such a self-generating meta-beast could do, who knew? The crowd surged around me, thrusting and clawing at me. I imagined the monster going out into the streets, maiming and killing, crying for blood. As my own mind dissolved into chaos, something strange and wonderful happened. I sensed a deep and momentary stilling in my mind, as though I had crossed a great, noisy battlefield into a waterfall of peace. Just for one glorious moment. Then the bees hummed in my head again, and it was all I could do to stagger about like a drunk at the fringes of the crowd, looking for that person. Useless, of course. Who walked so cleanly through the mad tangle that was the meta-beast, like a monk striding serenely through the sinful glitter of the world?

I learned later that there are only a few people like Sankaran, and that for very brief periods of time all people are like that. But some sustain that state of mind for most of their waking life. A cobbler mending shoes in front of a cinema hall in Bombay. A mathematician walking, seeing not the world but equations and things. A mother, single-minded about her ailing son. A lover in a dusty old garden, oblivious to roses. Yes, later I understood this state of mind.

• • • •

Life in the big city was never boring. There was scope for my abilities, and they led me into unexpected adventures. One time, while strolling through the fort city of Old Delhi, I came upon a young girl standing in a doorway. She was a waif, barely in her teens, incongruously dressed in a bright red salwaar kameez that was too big for her. The narrow street was full of people and noise, bicycle bells and the calls of fruit sellers, and the light had the dazzling clarity of high summer. Seeing her in the dark archway of an old building with the sunlight washing her thin face, I felt the anguish of her mind like a blow between the eyes. I sensed a hopelessness so absolute that instinctively I moved toward her. She drew back from me, and a man appeared out of the shabby darkness of what I then realized was a brothel.

That was how I met Dulari. My rescue of her involved most of my meager savings (her price) and a local women’s group. She was eventually given a job at a clothing shop that employed dozens of emaciated young women to sew name-brand clothes for overseas markets. I went to see her occasionally, but most of the time guilt made me stay away. Although her life was better than before, it was still no life for a fourteen-year-old girl. But I was now a member of the middle class. I had to pretend to a certain decorum. Besides, I lived in a tiny room sublet to me by a large and boisterous Punjabi family. Dulari had no place in my life.

But I could not hide from myself the fact that I could have loved her. She was a child, and it was not appropriate, but I saw past her painfully thin, broken body into her mind. She was like the proverbial lotus that grows in murky water; its roots are soiled, but it climbs upward, bifurcating into petals that open to the sky. Under the scars, a part of her was untouched by the privations and humiliations of her life; there was intelligence, hope, and layers of wonderful complexity and potential that perhaps would never find expression.

My colleague Manek was another matter entirely. He was well educated, had prospects, and was earning a reasonable salary. His mind—I could never look upon a person as simply a corporeal entity—was clean and simple, like an orderly room, and his thoughts and emotions were often quite transparent. One day, I sensed that he was depressed and asked him about it. In his simple, direct way, he told me that he was in love with a young woman he could not marry. There were caste and class issues, and his beloved’s family was keeping guard round the clock so the couple could no longer meet. To make matters worse, his parents were now looking for a suitable girl for him. Naturally I became Manek’s confidant.

That summer my landlord and his family decided to go home to their village in Punjab for the holidays. They padlocked all the doors in the apartment except for my room, the kitchen, and the bathroom and left me to a peace and privacy I had never before enjoyed.

So Manek came to see me at home. One day he was near tears and I put my arms around him to comfort him. After that we became lovers after a fashion. He was not gay, he said, but he wanted me to pretend to be a woman, to be held, caressed, and comforted. In his mind the illusion was so complete that as I lay with him, I could almost feel the swell of my breasts. Meanwhile I touched his mind with my own, furtively, tentatively. I think our occasional mental contact helped him relax, although he could not directly sense the tendrils of my mind. With his face buried against my bare shoulder, he would whisper the names of all the women he had loved from afar, ending with Anjana, his beloved.

Later there was Sheela, a quiet mouse of a woman, the older unmarried daughter of a couple who lived in the flat above. Her sisters were married off; she was the plain one, apparently, so there was not much hope that she would find someone. In her lovemaking, as in her mind, she was bold, imaginative, and tender, but everything she said was by touch or glance. During our few assignations, she never spoke a word. Once I broke our pact of silence by uttering the word “love.” She sat up on the bed, stared at me, her wide eyes filling with angry tears. “Don’t you dare say that word ever again,” she said fiercely. She leaped upon me and began to pull off my shirt. The dark places in her mind deepened, trembled; caves opened like mouths; rivers of emotion roared in the gorges, the hidden places of her soul. She was fascinating, but she did not want me. Ultimately, fate in the form of a divorced man looking for a wife took her away to some far city and another life.

Sometimes I worried about how different I was from other young men. I looked and dressed like a man, but I did not understand social conventions about what it meant to be a man or a woman. I could go out with other young men to seedy bars and drink beer, but I did not know that the women there were for flirting with, or that I should outshout the other men in a bid to impress. I would sit down with a woman and ask her about her work, or about the embroidery on her blouse. Women colleagues found that when I was the only male present they could talk as easily about “women” things as if they were by themselves; once I took part in a discussion about their periods, even though my role was only that of interested questioner. “God, Arun, you’re too much,” they would say, suddenly remembering I was a man. I watched cooking shows with as much curiosity as cricket and wrestling. My ability to sense minds enabled me to see human beings as entities beyond man-woman categories. I decided, after some months of informal study, that rather than two sexes there were at least thirty-four. Perhaps “sex” or “gender” isn’t right—perhaps a geographical term would be more appropriate—thirty-four climactic zones of the human mind!

But my peculiarities occasionally made me wonder about my future. My colleagues were falling in love, getting engaged, getting married. To me, each job was like a temporary resting place before the next thing, as was each relationship. Would my restlessness be my undoing? Janani dismissed my fears. “You are young,” she wrote in a letter. “Learn about the world, Arun. Embrace it. Love as many people as you can, but don’t let anyone keep you like a bird in a cage.”

By the time I met Sankaran I had learned a lot. Never to go to political rallies, for one thing. Or religious processions, although temples, churches, gurudwaras, and mosques were all right in small doses. I had also learned that contrary to what you might expect, families do not generally make good meta-minds. There is too much pushing and shoving about. They coalesce and come apart. Maybe they maintain a dynamic rather than a static equilibrium, because they are, after all, with each other day in and day out. Perhaps a meta-mind, indefinitely sustained, eventually goes mad.

I also did some experimenting with animals. There was a herd of cows that foraged in the street outside my apartment complex. They stood in the midst of traffic like humped, white islands, peacefully chewing cuds, or waited with bovine patience for people to dump their kitchen refuse at the corner garbage dump. I sensed their minds but did not understand the nature of their thoughts. One night, returning from work, I saw a magnificent bull standing in the middle of the road, on the median. Traffic swept by him on either side. In the luminous dust under the street lamps, he was like a great white ghost. Across the road the cows lay regarding him with indifference. I sensed his mind as clearly as if it had been visible. He was calling to the cows with all he had, a long, soundless low of desire. The cows’ response was, in effect, Not today, pal, we have cud to chew. It was then that I realized that animals could not only sense each other’s minds but also communicate mentally.

I continued my experiments with human minds, learning all kinds of interesting trivia. For instance, odd numbers, especially primes, make more stable meta-beasts; even numbers are less steady, especially if there are only two people involved. Couples are really dangerous, because there is nothing to balance the connection between the minds, no push to counter the pull, if you know what I mean. Which is why, long before I met Sankaran, I had decided never to fall in love.

• • • •

I met him in America. Janani encouraged me to go there after she heard from a fellow sensitive that Rahul Moghe had been seen in Chandigarh, only a few hours’ drive from Delhi. I felt the old, nameless fear again. I had not thought about Rahul Moghe in years. At that time my company was exporting a team of software people to the United States. Urged by a fury of letters from Janani, I joined the exodus to the land of milk and honey.

In America’s small towns, with their abnormally clean streets so strangely empty of people and animals, in the surreal, neon-bright canyons of vast skyscrapered cities, I found that I could further explore my ability to make meta-minds. Despite the much-touted individualism of Americans, I often encountered large groups of people with similar belief systems and mental processes. In the beginning it was vastly entertaining; I walked down Wall Street, peered in at the Stock Exchange. All those people, thinking themselves competitors and rivals, muttering into cell phones and shouting like deranged children—what a seamless, stable meta-mind they made! Then there was suburban America, yuppie-ville, with the over-large houses and multiple cars and boats, where it was just too easy. Teenagers expressing their individuality in their name-brand clothing and angst-ridden looks were easy, too, but there was a dark undercurrent in that meta-mind that disturbed me, hinting of dams upstream about to burst. I amused myself making meta-minds out of warring groups of political opponents and fundamentalist religious types with opposing loyalties. My own community of Indians, with few exceptions, lived in a time warp, adopting conventions and practices that no longer existed in India. Their constant obsession with their status as high-earning professionals was boring. Far more interesting were splinter groups living on the edge of mainstream culture; I made friends with Wiccans, Mexican immigrants, and an Ethiopian gay couple that ran a restaurant in San Francisco. I lived in California at first, working as little as I could get by with, indulging my special ability to the hilt. Despite all this, I felt a deep and increasing loneliness at the back of my mind, a longing not just for my old haunts in India, for old friends and people I had known, but for something beyond that. Already I was making a shape, a place, for Sankaran inside me.

Then something happened that drove me from California. One bright Saturday morning, I was swimming about in the shallows near a beach when I felt an undertow. I began to struggle against it; then I realized that it was in my mind. A powerful tug, reeling me in as though I were an exhausted fish. I recognized the summons that would not be denied. Rahul Moghe had found me at last.

I emerged from the water and found myself compelled to walk between sunbathers and colorful beach umbrellas toward a car parked on the road above the beach. I tried to stop, or to ask for help, but I was as helpless as a mannequin. As I came near the road one part of my mind noted that the car was a white sedan with tinted windows. A man in sunglasses sat in the driver’s seat. He leaned forward to open the passenger side door. I remember that a gold ring flashed on his hand.

There was a sudden squeal of brakes, a shuddering crash. A bus, pulling into its stop just behind the car, hadn’t slowed down enough. It rear-ended the parked car, buckling the back and making it rock forward. The pull of Rahul Moghe’s mind ceased abruptly.

I took the chance; I ran to where my beach bag lay, picked it up, crossed the road out of sight of the accident, and sprinted furiously through the parking lot on the other side of the road. My bare feet burned on the concrete, but in a minute or two I was in my car, driving off to safety. A police car came in from the other direction, siren wailing.

About twenty minutes later, I felt Rahul Moghe’s mind reach for me again, but his touch was faint, searching, tentative; a few minutes later, I couldn’t feel him at all.

Through sheer luck I had gotten away again.

• • • •

I changed jobs, fled the West Coast, and kept to old, sprawling eastern metropolises like New York and Boston. Nearly a year passed. There was no sign of Rahul Moghe. Janani’s letters also did not mention him except to warn me to be vigilant. She hoped I had seen the last of him.

I knew, however, that he would be back, that he would find me. I sensed this in a way that I did not understand. I would dream of him sometimes, of the long arms of his mind reaching for me, drawing me to him, to the abyss of his soul. He terrified me. But there was a part of me that wanted to know him, perhaps the only other person with my ability.

Then one afternoon, in a café in Boston, where I was attempting to drink what Americans fondly believe to be chai, I met Sankaran.

I was amusing myself constructing a meta-beast from the very uppity literary crowd in one corner and a dysfunctional family of four at the next table when someone coasted through the whole mess of mental cobwebbing like it wasn’t there. Instinctively I looked toward him. He was unmistakably Indian, delicately built, with a thatch of unkempt black hair and an apologetic and neglected mustache. His hands were slender and brown. He sat down with a book and a coffee cup and was soon lost in whatever he was reading.

I went across to him, trying to control my excitement. His being Indian provided an easy excuse to introduce myself.

He was a post-doctoral researcher at one of the universities scattered about this great city. He lived in a hole in Cambridge. While traveling on a bus, he had gotten so engrossed in a collection of conference reports that he had gotten off at the wrong stop. Finding himself near a café, he had dropped in for a coffee and a good, long read.

“You mean you don’t know where you are?”

He turned his brown eyes to me and smiled. For a moment he really seemed to be there in the café. “Does any body?” he said, separating the “body” from the “any” with the precision of a surgeon. I thought this a deeply philosophical statement until he explained that he meant that since the Earth and the solar system and the entire galaxy were constantly changing their places in space, one had to be very specific about reference frames. I was utterly charmed.

After I helped Sankaran find his way home, we became friends. He never sought me out, but I began to haunt a coffee shop in Cambridge where he turned up nearly every evening like a homing pigeon, armed with books and papers. When aware of the mundane world, he treated it with a bemused, indiscriminate kindness—being the kind of person who, upon bumping into people, doors, or potted plants, apologizes to them with equal courtesy. Much of the time I watched him over my coffee cup, filled with silent wonder. I could explore his mind, embrace it with my own, but I could not draw it to me, play with it, or manipulate it. He was untouched by my mental explorations. He had no need of me; he posed no threat. He filled the emptiness that had been growing in me.

I discovered in Sankaran some of the things that had drawn me to Dulari—but without the pain. His mind had the delicacy of petals about to unfurl and the innocence and wonder of a child beholding a rainbow for the first time. Instead of the white noise of contradictory emotions, the cacophony of thwarted desire and loneliness that makes up a typical human mind, his mind possessed the deep peacefulness found in high places, in the thin air of Himalayan country above the snow line. He did not torture himself with questions about his purpose in life or what other people thought about him—indeed, the obsession with self was quite absent in him. He was beautiful, a being absorbed at play in a universe far vaster than ordinary humans could imagine.

Looking at him, at his thin, mahogany brown body draped without grace on the sofa while his mind saw wonders I could only guess at, I was filled with the sweetness of desire. I wanted to touch his body as well as his mind. I wanted his touch, even if it were only as brief and innocent as a hand on my arm. In India, where platonic friends of the same sex often hold hands or fling arms around each other in public without censure or misunderstanding, it would have been easy. But social mores were different here, and—more to the point—he remained unaware of my need of him.

I spent as much time as I could with Sankaran. Sometimes I would meet him in the physics department and amuse myself looking at star charts on the computer as he finished a colloquium or worked out his equations. He would join me at the computer when he was done and fill me with astronomical lore as we roamed the galaxy. Here was a red giant, there a supernova, a binary star system, a neutron star, a black hole, an extra-solar planet fifteen times the mass of Jupiter. I learned the lexicon of astronomy as a lover learns the body of his love.

Gradually I got to know a little about Sankaran’s background. He was from a learned Tamilian family. He was very fond of his mother and his elder brother, who remained in the ancestral home in Chennai after his father’s death. I had a mental picture of the faded whitewash on the walls, the banana trees in the courtyard at the back. When he talked about his family, he seemed suddenly to come to earth.

“My mother’s cooking, nothing like it.” Or, “Unna taught me calculus in eighth class.”

“They want for me to get married,” he told me once, shyly. He shook his head. “I do not have time for a wife. But it is also tradition to continue your line. Life is not simple.” He sighed. But for an accident of gender and the cruelty of convention, I would have married him in a minute.

He was also a devotee of Lord Shiva. He kept a small stone Shiva lingam in his room, a shrine in a bookshelf surrounded by books and papers on astrophysics. There was only one picture on the wall—a photograph of the beautiful and graceful Tamilian actress Shobhana. Sankaran confessed shyly to me that he was a fan.

I feigned an interest in cooking so I could spend more time with him in the privacy of his room. As I stirred eggplant curry on the stove, I would look at him as he lay on the bed, flipping through the latest Astrophysical Journal, his eyes dreamy. He would mutter phrases that were meaningless to me, things like “virial theorem” or “off-main-sequence star.” Sometimes I would ask him to explain, and I would perch on the bed next to him, feeling the heat of his body, the passion of his intellect. I would glance up at the stone phallus of Shiva and remember how it felt to pretend to be a woman for my old lover, Manek. In the little studio apartment, the air would fill with the smell of roasting spices, cumin and coriander, and the sharp, enticing aroma of ginger. I would lean close to Sankaran, looking with him at incomprehensible pages of equations and star charts, conscious only of his nearness, the soft black hairs on his arms stirring in unison with the rhythm of his breath. I would stretch my mind toward his, enclosing him, burying myself between the flanks of his beautiful, oblivious mind. Sleepy with desire, I would remember that one of the manifestations of Shiva is Ardhanarishwaram: half man, half woman. Shiva is the one who dances the world into being and out of it. One day I said:

“Tell me something, Sankaran. If you could ask the Lord Shiva three questions, what would they be?”

He was silent for a while. Then he said, “I would ask if the dark matter problem is truly a question of missing mass. Then I would ask about the Higgs boson and the accelerating expansion rate. Which may be related to the very failure of the standard model I mentioned at the seminar. You have to consider . . .”

I would distract him gently back to my question. Each time I asked him the question, he would answer as though he had never been asked this before. One day, after he had read a letter from his mother, he sighed.

“I would like to ask Lord Shiva if there is some way I can avoid getting married without hurting my family.”

And once:

“I would ask Lord Shiva if there is life on the extra-solar planets we have found. If there is life on other worlds at all.”

I found myself falling into Sankaran’s gravitational well as inevitably as a star being swallowed by a black hole.

Janani cautioned me not to focus on Sankaran to the exclusion of other things. “Explore your ability,” she wrote. “Travel a bit. See the world, Arun. Immerse yourself in it. We think all we have are our paltry possessions and the special people in our lives. But the world is greater than that . . .”

Her advice came too late. I remember wondering about the tone of Janani’s letter—she was not one to wax philosophical as a rule. It occurred to me that she never wrote about her life in Rishikesh, or the woman she worked with—I had never thought to ask about these things. But then I had a new distraction. Sankaran got a phone call from his elder brother in India. The family had found him a bride. He was to go home in a week to tie the knot.

He told me the news with a resigned air. Clearly he saw marriage as a duty to endure with good grace. We sat in silence for a while, my own mind reeling with dismay and resentment. Then Sankaran turned back to his notes and scribbled away at his equations, quite happily lost in his universe of stellar wonders, and I was relieved. The wife would be a nuisance, and I would have to find a way to spend time with Sankaran without her interfering, but she could never truly touch him, never own him. How could one woman compete with a trillion burning suns?

I saw him off at the airport. As I felt the quiet comfort of his mind recede, I staggered out into the warm light of a spring day, a man adrift in a sea of blathering minds, without an island in sight.

The days of his absence are still clear to me: the heat of my apartment, the monotony of the days at work, the stupefying predictability of the minds around me that produced an answering dullness in my own soul.

Then came a letter from Janani that worried and mystified me.

“I am going on a journey to Thailand,” she wrote. “I, who have never been out of India! I am very excited to be traveling on a plane and seeing the world, just as you have done. At my age, too! Still, it is not a pleasure trip. I am on an adventure, Arun, the culmination of a life’s work. I don’t know if I will emerge from it unscathed. Meanwhile I have just sent you a parcel containing the last of your things. When you understand who you are, Arun, I hope you will forgive me . . .”

There was no way to contact Janani for details. The little shop where she lived and worked as a seamstress did not have a phone. I debated going to India to see her. The thought was tempting. I had not been home in three years. Perhaps later I could go down to Chennai and see Sankaran. I began making inquiries at a travel agent’s.

• • • •

But Providence had other plans.

A few days before I was to pay for my ticket, I woke up in the throes of a nightmare. I sat up in bed in the half-light of dawn, looking around at the familiar chaos of my room, wiping my sweaty hands on the bedclothes. The monster that had been there in my dream was still present, however. I sensed it—a meta-mind of great power. It seemed to be some distance away, a fact that puzzled me. Even the self-generated meta-mind I had encountered at the rally in Delhi had had a fairly short range. I remembered how it had buzzed and hummed in my ears, driving me close to madness. This was something like that, but quieter. It was engaged in some kind of play, like a child absorbed in a toy. Only this play felt dangerous.

I could have walked away from it, but I felt a deep curiosity mingled with fear. Where was this meta-mind? What was taking up its attention so completely? How had such a powerful thing come into being?

I dressed hurriedly, flung myself into the car, and began to drive toward it.

When I was halfway to Boston (having driven about ten miles) I realized it was much farther than I had thought. What could make its presence felt from so far away?

My apprehension mounted the closer I got to it. As I drove between the tall buildings of the city, with the sunlight flashing on tiers of windowpanes, reflecting in my eyes, I realized that the meta-mind was different from any I had encountered. The one at the Red Fort had been a hasty and temporary thing, powerful only because it was made up of seventeen thousand minds. This thing had fewer components and was more focused, like a laser beam.

I came to a stop before an old brick office building. Sirens wailed; as I leaped out of my car, police vehicles and ambulances drove up, disgorging men in uniform. A crowd had collected in front of the building, looking skyward with a mixture of apprehension and ghoulish anticipation. I squinted against the glare of the sun and saw a man standing on a window ledge some seven stories above the street. He teetered, looked behind him, and jumped.

He seemed to fall in slow motion, his arms flung up as though in surrender. About halfway down, his mind, which had been locked in a trancelike state, woke up to screaming terror. Too quickly, a red flower blossomed on the sidewalk, and a splinter of bone buried itself in a watching woman’s arm. People screamed, moving back, stumbling over each other. Blood spattered their clothes. TV cameras zoomed in as policemen began to shout orders.

Then the next one fell. A woman, her skirts billowing up. She broke like a cracked egg on the sidewalk.

In the screaming and confusion, I darted into an entrance I’d noticed further along the sidewalk.

I took an elevator to the seventh floor. The meta-mind was still quivering with satisfaction. It was composed of not more than twenty minds, twisted and knotted together, not randomly but with the intricacy, order, and beauty of an integrated circuit or a Persian carpet. It was beautiful and deadly, and I sensed its hunger as it felt around for its next victim.

I entered a corridor with plush blue carpeting and chrome and glass décor. The place was cold and smelled of fear. People stood silently in little knots, with wide, frightened eyes. A troop of policemen were trying to force open one of the double doors in the hallway. A large woman in a red business suit was flailing her arms and crying hysterically, “Another one! There must be another one!”

I stood very still, concentrating, stilling my own fears. My mind felt like it was being run over by a convoy of trucks. I thought of Sankaran, took a deep breath, and concentrated on undoing the meta-mind. I slipped into the meta-mind the way a snake enters a marsh, without a ripple, and started to unravel it, thread by thread, mind by mind. The exquisite patterns and symmetries were the work of a master. As I took it apart, I regretted having to destroy something so beautifully constructed.

It came loose as though it had been turned off with a switch. I took a breath of relief, and found that my knees were shaking. I trembled all over, and little rivers of sweat dribbled down my face. Untangling it had taken more out of me than I had realized.

I leaned against the wall for support, fighting panic. Meanwhile the hysterical woman had stopped shouting and was looking around her in bewilderment. Tears started running down her face. The double doors that the police had been trying to force opened suddenly, and a man looked out. He seemed dazed. The policemen pushed him aside and ran into the room. Inside, people were getting up from a table, passing hands over their eyes, shaking their heads, as though they were coming out of a trance. Sunlight streamed through an open window; the glass lay smashed on the floor, like diamonds. One of the men at the table looked at the window, the policemen. “What happened?” he asked.

I walked with difficulty to the elevator; every few steps I had to stop to lean against the wall. People around me were shouting, crying, and rushing about, and nobody took any notice of me. As I stumbled into the elevator I realized that only one person could have constructed a meta-mind so powerful.

Now I recognized the familiar swift current of his mind drawing me toward him. I staggered out of the lobby and round the corner of the building to a blue station wagon. I saw the tinted windows, the flash of the gold ring as the door opened. I got into the passenger seat almost thankfully, collapsing in a heap.

Rahul Moghe took off his sunglasses, looked at me, and smiled. I had an impression of largeness, although physically he was not more than average in height and build. Seeing him in his entirety, body and mind, was like looking at a vast ship with the prow head-on. His eyes burned like forest fires in his dark face—his arms reached toward me, pulling me into the seat. I heard the click of the seat belt.

Much later, when I came to, the first thing I saw was his face, leaning over me. We were in a dingy hotel room. I remember the hardness of the bed on which I lay, the sunlight making a pool of brightness on the green carpet. I closed my eyes, but he was still there in my mind.

The feelers of his mind held me close, with an intimacy that terrified me. He spoke.

“You are a coward, Arun. You run from the only person who is like you. Why?”

The fingers of his mind opened every door, every barrier in my mind. He entered my memories, my secret places, the unknown depths of my consciousness. He gathered me to him, and hot pincers of pain gripped my head.

“What you saw just now is only the beginning of what we can do together. You don’t know who you are, or how long I have needed you. Together we will build meta-minds that will make this last one look like a child. Come, I will train you, tell you how to use your power. But first let me tell you who you are. At last . . .”

His mind relaxed its hold on mine as he began to caress me. I was so tired; I had struggled for so long. Now I could rest. I had never known what it was like to reach across the void between one person and another and find a hand held out to grasp your own . . .

I hit him with all the strength I had. I got him squarely on his throat; he rolled off the bed and fell gasping and gurgling to the ground. My mind pushed his away as I leaped off the bed. He lay on the ground, clutching his throat, rolling from side to side.

As my hands fumbled with the doorknob, a searing pain tore through my head. He was sitting on the floor, rubbing his neck, concentrating. Against my will, I turned around and walked back to him and sat helplessly on the bed. The pain receded. He sat beside me, his arms pushing me down until his face was leaning over mine.

“You don’t know who you are, Arun. That bitch Janani took your memories away from you. Did you know that? She took away what you were. If I could resurrect you, I would. But all I can do now is share with you . . .”

My vision blanked. I dropped into darkness, into a silence in which my own screams kept echoing. Terrifying images came crowding out of the dark—demonlike visages and shapes that kept morphing from one monstrosity to another. I fell with them toward a pale circle of light that opened up below me like the mouth of a well. Then I lost consciousness.

When I came to, Rahul Moghe was holding me up against his shoulder, trying to spoon something into my mouth. I gagged as chicken soup went down my throat, then licked my cracked lips and tried to struggle out of his grasp. The room spun.

“Take it easy,” he said. A dim lamp lit the room; I saw that night had already fallen. I felt weak and spent.

“It was too much for you, too fast,” he told me, spooning more soup into my mouth. “I see that I have to work against a great deal of conditioning. So much damage has been done . . .”

He let me sleep after that, but throughout my incarceration I never truly regained consciousness. I experienced brief periods of wakeful clarity, but for the most part I was in a confused, dreamlike state during which I could not distinguish between reality and the nightmares that plagued me. Held in Rahul Moghe’s fierce grip, his face against mine, I thought I heard voices of people I had known. Once it seemed a woman lay by me, painfully thin; she nestled sensuously against my shoulder and spoke in Dulari’s voice. Another time I felt Sankaran prop me up to a sitting position. I thought I was being rescued at last, but he was holding a star chart in his hands, pointing at it, saying something insistently. Old friends—the boys I had played with in my teenage years, Manek—walked through my consciousness like ghosts. Always Rahul Moghe was there in my mind, muttering in my ear in Hindi, English, and languages I could not understand. “You belong to me,” he would say. “You and I are one of a kind . . . both alien, both lost, both pretending to belong . . .” And again: “Alone, our powers are nothing. Together we can do things . . .” Sometimes his words would echo in my head like muffled drumbeats: “power to change . . . to change . . . to change . . .” or “she burned you . . . burned you . . .” He would alternately entreat and reprimand me. “You think you belong, Arun,” I remember him muttering against my ear. “But you live in a dangerous place outside the boundaries humans create around themselves. Man-woman. Mind-body . . . If your so-called friends could see you as you are, they would hate and revile you. I am the only friend you have, my love. We owe our allegiance to a different star . . .”

I saw myself falling again toward a pale sun, surrounded by demonlike wraiths that stretched long fingers toward me. “This is who you are,” Rahul Moghe whispered. His hands raked my bare chest. As I bit back a cry of pain, I perceived it—his mind, opening before me like sunrise on a new world. I saw the power, the beauty, the ruthlessness of him—the mountain ranges, the sheer cliffs, vast Escher-like vistas. He was letting me into his soul.

And I turned to him, reaching out exploring arms toward this stupendous geography. As we lay entwined, he changed beside me—his skin paled, then darkened; his hair changed colors like a kaleidoscope. Arms and breasts and thighs moved against my skin—I had a glimpse of a great, hungry creature, all orifices and phalluses—and as I joined with him, I could no longer tell body from mind. Then, just as our bizarre mating reached its climax, he tore into me, tasting and feeding, ripping and slicing.

When eons later I opened my eyes, I was weak but able to think. Rahul Moghe lay beside me, asleep, one arm flung over my chest. Afternoon light filtered through the green plastic curtains. My mind felt as though it had been shredded and trampled on. To my horror I saw that the covers over my chest were stained with blood. Warily I groped about in my mind for him, but he was gone. Slowly and carefully I put myself back together, like an injured animal licking its wounds.

Just then I saw the door open halfway. An olive-skinned woman stood there, holding a pile of clean sheets, her mouth open. She backed out and shut the door behind her. Had I dreamed her? And if not, why had I not felt her mind? Why had Rahul Moghe not stirred, not known she was there? It came to me that she was a blank, one of those whose minds were inaccessible to me. And to him, also, I realized.

I must have fallen into exhausted slumber, because when I woke again the room was dark and the phone was ringing. Moghe stirred beside me, cursed, and turned on the lamp. He grabbed the phone and spoke into it for a few minutes in Hindi. His mind was quivering with excitement.

“Another of our kind has been found,” he told me. “You are too weak to travel with me. I must leave you for a few days. Do not think of betraying me. A man in the hotel who is my servant will look after you.”

When I found my voice it was barely a whisper.

“Where . . .?”

“Bangkok,” he said.

I fell asleep again and woke some time later to find a strange dark-haired older man in the room, dressed in the hotel livery of white and green. His mind was like a cowering animal. “This is Odylio,” Moghe said. “He will feed you and check on you. Perhaps without me you will recover faster.” He leaned toward me, and for a moment I saw the mouths of the demons that plagued my sleep. “Wait for me, Arun,” he whispered, and then he was gone.

That night Odylio fed me soup. He did not try to talk to me. I was too weak to play any tricks with his mind; besides which, I suspected that whatever Rahul Moghe had done to this man could not be reversed by my poor skill. In Moghe’s absence my mind slowly cleared; I began to think of escape, although it seemed impossible. Perhaps the soup had some drug in it—I was still unnaturally weak. I lay helpless, sensing the minds of people passing by outside the door, but I could not even cry out.

Then, next morning after breakfast, the olive-skinned cleaning woman opened the door. She was holding a pile of towels. She gave me a nervous look and began to back out. I raised my hand weakly from the bed. “Help me!” I croaked.

She came slowly into the room, her eyes wide. She looked at me and said something I could not understand. She set the towels down, picked up the phone, and began speaking breathlessly in what I realized must be Portuguese.

I had avoided and feared blanks all my life; the irony of being rescued by one was not lost on me. I was taken to hospital by the police; lying there with the IV in my arm, I closed my eyes to stop the tears of relief and gratitude and to remember the face of my deliverer.

The police did not believe my story. Although I did not think there was much point in telling them the truth—mere forces of law and order could hardly contain a person such as Rahul Moghe—I was too weak to invent something more plausible. The hotel receptionist had said very clearly that the person who had checked in and taken the key of Room 323 was a young white woman called Marie Grenier from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Nobody knew anything about an Indian man.

I never found out what, if anything, the Brazilian maid told the police, or whether they had believed her.

That night, I sat up in my hospital bed and detached the IV from my arm. I found my clothes folded neatly at the foot of the bed, and changed into them with some difficulty. There were bandages on my chest that hurt every time I moved. I dragged myself from corridor to corridor under garish fluorescent lights, choking on the antiseptic smell, until I came upon a side exit.

The cool night air revived my senses. With the last of my strength I found the nearest subway station, took a train journey that I can no longer remember, and went home to my apartment. I didn’t have any of my things with me—I had to find the manager, who was not amused at being woken at four in the morning. I fell onto my bed and slept until noon.

When I woke, my mind was mercifully my own. I was bruised and injured physically and mentally from my ordeal—I thought longingly of Sankaran’s healing presence—but at the same time I dared to hope that I would recover.

• • • •

I resigned from my job, telling my colleagues I had found work in Florida. I withdrew my savings from my bank and rented a room in a ramshackle apartment complex in Cambridge. I requested an unlisted phone number, obtained a post office box under a different name, and immediately wrote Janani to let her know how to reach me.

If it had not been for Sankaran, I would have fled to the ends of the earth. I don’t think Moghe understood that. I believe that my subterfuge paid off because he expected me to leave Boston, to run before him as I had done before. I would no longer run.

Within a few weeks, I found a job working with a medical company as a lowly computer technician. It paid enough to keep me alive, and to maintain my car. Now assured of a livelihood and a roof over my head, I could no longer avoid thinking about my ordeal with Rahul Moghe and what it implied about my past. Janani’s last parcel, which came a few days after my new job started, confirmed that I had not dreamed up the events in that hotel room.

The parcel contained the usual junk that Janani had sent me over the years, bits of broken metal and shards of ceramic, some with drawings and etchings on them. There was also a letter.

I read it. I looked at the contents of the parcel that I had piled on the bed. I read the letter again. I remembered Rahul Moghe whispering impossible things into my ear.

“Alien, alien, alien,” he had said. “You and I owe our allegiance to a different star.”

I looked at the strange objects on the bed. Whether I wanted them to or not, they began to make sense. The ceramic pieces, burnt black on one side, red on the other. The strange etchings, the pointillist ones in particular, one of them showing me a pattern I had seen before, not only on Sankaran’s computer but also in my fevered dreams: the constellation Sapt-Rishi as seen from Earth. Then the pictures Janani had taken, of the boys so like me—they were all me, I realized, at various stages of formation.

I could no longer avoid the truth of my origin. I sat on my bed, watching night fall, shadows moving out from the corners of the room to fill it with darkness. Headlight beams swept across the curtained window, and through the thin walls I could hear my neighbors having an argument about laundry.

I laughed hysterically. After a while I started to cough, so I got up, turned on the light, and got a drink of water. Looking out of the grimy window at the busy street in front of my apartment complex, I had an impulse to cry.

Instead I went to the local pub and drank myself stupid. I told the bartender I was an alien. He gave me a sad look from beneath long, dark eyelashes and went on polishing glasses. “You won’t believe how many people tell me that,” he said. This set me off laughing again, until I was weeping large tears onto the bar. I don’t remember how I got home. I slept like a dead person until late the next afternoon.

When I woke I had a headache the size of Antarctica; I staggered into the shower with my clothes on. Under the cold water some of my reason returned. I stripped, looking down at my all-too-human body. I thought about the notion that Janani was as much my murderer as my progenitor. She had burned me, Moghe had said. I understood now that I was stuck with this body, this gender, because of that. Unlike him, I could no longer change form; nor could I tell friend from foe. “Damn them all, Moghe and Janani and all,” I told myself.

I spent two days in this insane state, staring at the things on my bed, rereading Janani’s letter. Rahul Moghe appeared in my dreams, and sometimes I would wake terrified, feeling as though I was still his prisoner, that my escape had only been a trick of the mind. Then, slowly, sanity would return.

On the third day, a colleague, Rick, called from work to ask why I had not come in. I stammered something about being sick. Rick commiserated and asked when I could come in. They were having a problem with the computer system.

So the world pulled me back. I spent the next few days working out and fixing the glitch. Having to focus helped me a great deal. When two other technicians took me out for pizza after it was all done, I saw myself in the mirrors that ran along two walls of the restaurant. There I was, a skinny Indian guy with stubble on my chin and pizza sauce at the corners of my mouth, grinning and guzzling like everyone else. Rick’s people had immigrated here three generations ago from Holland. Aichiro was a second-generation Japanese immigrant. So what if I’d come from a farther shore than anyone else? This was Boston, one of the great melting pots of the world, where nearly everyone was a stranger. My two colleagues were both married, and I, too, had someone I loved, someone to wait for. The revelation about my true identity seemed, all of a sudden, irrelevant.

• • • •

As soon as I could take leave from my job, I booked a flight to India. It was too late to attend Sankaran’s wedding. Much as I wanted to see him, I felt this wasn’t the right time. As for Janani, I had no idea what I would say to her, but she owed me some answers. I also had to admit to a growing worry about her silence. Why had she not written to me? What had happened to her in Thailand? Surely it could not be a coincidence that she and Moghe had been headed to the same place?

I did not know how much I had missed being in India until I was in Delhi, taking in great lungfuls of warm air that smelled of car exhaust, roasting corncobs, and eleven million people. From the Inter State Bus Terminus, I took a night bus to Rishikesh, traveling with a group of elderly pilgrims who took pity on me and shared their dinner of parathas and pickled mangoes. As dawn came, I woke from uneasy slumber to find myself breathing in the scent of the Himalayas.

It took the auto-rickshaw man only about ten minutes to locate the address I gave him. He piloted his little vehicle through narrow, twisting streets, past amiable gatherings of cows, goats, and people to a small row of shops. Their shutters were still down, and the shopkeepers were bustling about in front of their shops, putting up the cots they had slept in. At last I came to the place Janani had lived in for the past ten years.

I searched for her with my mind, but she was not there. A handsome, middle-aged woman in a blue cotton sari was raising the shutters. She was chewing on a neem twig. Every few seconds she would rub her teeth with the twig and spit in a corner in front of the shop. (I remembered, with a pang, Janani teaching me how to brush my teeth in just this manner.) Behind the woman I could see two large, old-fashioned sewing machines and a number of finished clothes on racks. An array of grimy bottles stood on a shelf—Janani’s herbal concoctions. I smelled the familiar aroma of tulsi. Heeng. Dried amla.

I put my palms together. “Namaste,” I said. “My name is Arun. I am looking for Janani-behn. Are you Rinu Devi?”

Her eyes widened; the neem twig fell from her mouth. Her mind was quivering, tense. I found her reaction puzzling.

“Janani is not here,” she said with outward composure. “She has moved to foreign lands.”

“I know she went to Thailand,” I said, coming into the shop. I was aware of a curious urchin or two hanging about, listening. The woman’s mind was bristling with fear and dislike.

“I am just a friend,” Rinu Devi said, sounding placating. She gave me a wary look. “Janani’s helped me run my shop these past few years. Then recently she met someone and got married and went to Thailand.”

She was lying. I looked outside. It was still early, and only a slow car or sleepy bullock cart went by. The urchins had gone back to their business for the moment.

“Look, Rinu-ji,” I said. “I could be nice and spend the next two days trying to persuade you to tell me the truth. Or I could mess with your mind. Janani must have told you what kind of monster I am.”

She gave me a look of loathing.

“If you must know, Janani went to a place near Bangkok, I don’t remember the name, because she heard that one of your kind had landed there. Someone new. She went to organize a burning. It’s been nearly a month and she has not been back. How can I say what happened to her?”

“Did she leave any message, any note?”

“No. She wasn’t one to confide in me about these things. She told me just this: that she might not return. She expected danger.” Rinu Devi’s mind was calmer now. She was feeling more confident. Yet under the façade I sensed strong emotion.

“That’s all she told you? Why didn’t she confide in you?”

“She knew I don’t like her involvement in the network. I’ve never understood why she wouldn’t just want to kill the aliens instead of . . . of changing them. We . . . we had disagreements.”

I took a deep breath.

“What network?”

She raised her eyebrows in mock astonishment.

“Oh, she didn’t tell you? There are other people like her who can sense the aliens. Whenever they hear of an unusual event—like reports of strange lights in the sky—they go to that place. If they find one of your kind, they burn them to take away their power. What’s left is like an empty gourd.”

“Where is this network? Where are the other people like me?”

She curled her lip. Her mind trembled with spite.

“Mostly in mental hospitals,” she said. “Or wandering the streets, begging, I don’t know. Janani didn’t go far enough with you—she said you called out to her, as your old self died. She pulled you out of the fire too early.”

I sensed it then: my ghost self. It stood at the edge of my consciousness, a limb raised, as though to beckon. But I am dead, I thought. I am dead.

Into the silence between us came the sounds of shutters being opened, a cot being dragged across the ground. Mingled with the smell of Janani’s herbs was the pungent scent of pine. Away and below us the great Ganga rushed frothing toward the plains.

When I spoke, my voice was barely a whisper.

“But why . . . why do they do this to us?”

I already knew the answer. In her last letter, Janani had said that they had to burn me to save me, to make me human. Rahul Moghe had escaped this ordeal by fire, she wrote, and look how dangerous he was. But apart from him, she had said nothing about others like me or about a network. Perhaps my species was indeed hostile to humankind. And yet . . . what if that was not the case with every individual? What if some of us were different? What right did Janani and her network have to deny us the chance to be who we were?

“You really don’t know much, do you?” said Rinu. Her tone had lost some of its bite. “You are alien—enemy. You want to subdue us, enslave us!”

“But—” I began.

She waved an impatient hand. “I can’t answer your questions. I don’t know who these network people are. I just wanted her to leave the whole thing, to have a life with me . . .”

Her eyes filled with tears. I sensed her mind turning over, like a cat turns on its back, exposing the belly. Here she was, vulnerable, all pretense lost. Her hatred of me was not gone but contained, as water is by a dam.

“Did you love her?” I asked.

She wiped her eyes with the free end of her sari.

“How could I not? We were friends as girls.” She hesitated, looked at me with defiance, chewing the end of her neem twig with strong white teeth. “We began like sisters, but then we fell in love. She left me to work for the network. When she came back here after years, I thought . . . I thought . . .”

“You thought she had come back to you, but she was still working for the network.”

She nodded. Eyes that had once been beautiful peered out from a nest of premature wrinkles. Lines of discontent surrounded the well-shaped lips. Her hair was tied in a bun, the free end of the sari draped over her head. Her sari was blue, not white, but I knew I was looking into the face of a mourner.

“So she said nothing about this network,” I said at last. “You didn’t see her meet anyone . . .”

“I don’t know anything about those people,” she said. “Janani knew I would be upset if she talked about them. Always, letters came for her, and phone calls at the booth in the next lane. I don’t know anything.”

She made space for me on a mat on the floor. Through the one shutter she had opened, pale light came in. She went to the front and yelled to a boy to bring tea.

The tea came in chipped glasses, milky and strong with the scent of cardamom. I sipped and listened to Rinu talk about her life with Janani. She kept rubbing tears away from the corners of her eyes.

“Why are you so certain she is dead?” I asked her. Without a word she got up, went behind a curtain at the back of the shop, and returned with an envelope that she handed to me. When I opened it I found a piece of newsprint torn from an English-language daily based out of Bangkok. With it was a note in a crude hand that said simply: “Sorry. She was one of our best.” It was signed “A.R.”

“The man at the tea shop read it to me,” she said, pointing to the newspaper fragment. “I don’t read English—not enough.”

The news brief said only that there had been an explosion in an abandoned warehouse in a locality on the outskirts of Bangkok. Three people had been killed, two of them women. One of them was believed to have been a tourist from India, one Janani Devi. The heat from the explosion had been so great that nothing recognizable had been left of the bodies. Witnesses had seen the three people entering the warehouse just before the explosion.

I stared at the dirty little piece of paper, numb with grief and anger. This only confirmed what I had feared all along—that Janani was dead. I would never be able to confront her now, never have answers to my questions. Never receive letters from her, full of scolding and advice . . .

Rinu leaned forward, patted me on the shoulder. She wiped her face with the end of her sari. I thought of Rahul Moghe in the hotel room, the phone call, and his face filled with hunger and anticipation as he said, “Bangkok.”

Who had called him? Who had told him about the next landing? Had he known Janani would be there?

For that matter, how had he known—twice—where to find me?

“You betrayed her, didn’t you?” My words came out brokenly.

Her shapely lower lip trembled. Perhaps she thought I could read her mind. But the pieces were slowly coming together.

“You were the one who told Rahul Moghe I had gone to America. Someone must have been telling him. How else would he find me in San Francisco and Boston? You couldn’t read the English return addresses on my letters to Janani, but perhaps you could read enough to make out the city I was in. Tell me, did you phone him from somewhere, or did you write?”

She flinched, then gathered herself together and stood up. I stood up also, trembling with rage. She spat at my feet.

“Yes, yes, I betrayed her. I told Rahul Moghe that she was going to Bangkok, that they had found one of his kind. I knew he would find her and confront her, perhaps kill her. So what! She betrayed our love a hundred times. I always came second for her. Even to you—you!”

Tears slid down her face, and a wave of jealous hatred rose in her mind.

“You! A thing, a creature from another world—she loved you better than me! Serve her right! But I never knew what it would be like without her. I thought I could just go back to the time ten years ago before she returned. I had become free of wanting her, you see . . .”

My mind lashed out at hers like the talons of a predatory bird. I had never been able to do this before. Suddenly, I knew I could hurt her. I drew back. I looked at her, now sobbing at my feet. A face peered around the shutters.

“Anything wrong, Rinu-behn?”

It was the barber’s wife from next door; she glared suspiciously at me.

“It’s all right,” I said. “It’s just some bad news I brought. Death in the family. Look after her—I must be on my way.”

I left that miserable creature sobbing in the arms of her neighbor and went away, feeling a hundred curious eyes on me.

• • • •

In my little hotel room I lay on my bed and stared at the ceiling for what seemed like days. The sun rose and set in the two small windows that faced each other, and each time dark fell I saw the stars of Sapt-Rishi burning in a velvet sky.

Sapt-Rishi . . . Sankaran showing me star charts on his computer.

I roused myself, made a phone call to Sankaran’s home in Chennai. It would be good to see him, I thought. But he wasn’t there. I talked to his mother, who spoke with enthusiasm about the wedding. She told me that Sankaran and his bride had gone to Ootacamund for their honeymoon.

I thought of Sankaran in the blue Nilgiri hills, the stars spreading in the sky above him like a great, sequined quilt. Would he lecture his wife on celestial objects? Would she listen to him as I had? A great wave of envy and loneliness swept over me.

I spent the remaining week of my leave wandering around the hill towns near Rishikesh. I bathed in the holy waters of the Ganga with the other pilgrims. I went to a lonely shrine of Lord Shiva’s, high in the mountains. Moved by a strange impulse, I set before the stone lingam a small offering of marigolds. In the little hill towns, I walked the crowded streets restlessly, enjoying, despite my grief and loneliness, the anonymity that I had nowhere else in the world.

• • • •

When I returned to Boston, I was in the lowest of spirits. I had lost everything, including my illusions about myself. Sankaran was my last resort. I needed the healing touch of his mind, the restful pleasure of his company. Meanwhile I wondered uneasily about Rahul Moghe. He seemed to have vanished from my life, but I could never rid myself entirely of his presence. It was as though he had left a splinter lodged in me, a ghost of a voice that called to me with a longing that could not be denied, an endless summons of desire that reminded me of the bull I had seen once on a street in New Delhi.

Sankaran’s itinerary was posted on my fridge. As the day of his return approached, I became more and more nervous. What if his wife was a tyrant? What if she restricted his movements so that we could no longer meet? How could I make a claim on him that would be at least equal to that of his wife?

How does a man who is not a man or a woman, not a human or an alien—how does such a being confess his love to another man?

Then it came to me: I would tell him my story.

Not all at once, but with hints and intimations at first.

I shook all over at the thought. With Janani gone, there was nobody in the world excepting Rinu and the network who knew what I was. What better evidence of love and trust could I give Sankaran?

On an impulse I went to the local bookstore and bought the most lavish card I could find. In it I wrote:

Dear Sankaran,

Lord Shiva has given me an answer to one of the questions you asked him.

There is life on other worlds. Let’s talk about this.

Your Friend,

Arun.

I put the card in an envelope and pushed it under the door of his apartment. Breathlessly I waited for his return, for the time when I could once more sink my mind into the cool streambed of his being. On the day that he was to arrive, I decided to surprise him by meeting him and his wife at the airport.

Because there was a traffic pileup on the highway, I was late getting to the airport. When I rushed into the baggage claim area, most of the passengers from his flight had left. I looked around for him for a while. Finally I realized that he must have already gone home.

I drove like a madman to his apartment. When I arrived, I found Sankaran and his wife relaxing over coffee. Sankaran welcomed me and introduced me to his wife.

She was all aglitter in a blue silk sari and gold jewelry. Her eyes were like black beetles. She smiled coldly and disapprovingly at me. With a shock, I realized that I could not sense her mind at all. She was a blank.

As for Sankaran, I sensed that the clarity and beauty of his mind was already being undermined by the confusion and contradictions that characterize the ordinary person. There were only hints of damage now, but the clean, clear transparency of his soul that had sustained me was breaking up into bubbles, little patches of opacity. He was dissipating before my eyes.

What had she done to him?

She was holding the card I had put under the door. She wrinkled her nose as though she had picked it up out of the trash and handed it to him.

“What’s this?”

He glanced at it without (apparently) noting my untidy scrawl. He shrugged his shoulders, put the card on the desk, and smiled fondly at his wife, following her movements with his eyes as she poured me a cup of coffee. He was already only peripherally aware of me.

My heart clenched in my chest. I drank my coffee in a few gulps, burning my tongue, made my excuses as quickly as I could, and left them to their domestic bliss.

The next time I saw Sankaran, I didn’t see him. I was in the café, and he walked in with his wife, and I didn’t even feel the quiet, clean wave of his mind wash over and refresh my soul.

I remembered then what physicists say about solitons—eventually they all dissipate.

It is hard for me to recall with composure the days after these events. I lived in a surreal, depressive daze in which night and day blurred into one another. My mind dwelled constantly on death and loss.

When my company folded and I lost my job, I left Boston and began to travel. My depression gave way to the restlessness that had always been a part of me. I moved from port to port, taking up jobs in short spells, staying only as long as the wanderlust let me. I felt as though I was being shadowed—whether it was by my ghost self or Rahul Moghe I could not tell. A footfall on a quiet street in the outskirts of Atlanta. My hotel door in Milan creaking open, then shut, while I lay half-asleep on the bed. A whisper in a darkened street in Ankara, saying my name. Through this troubled time, I continued to experiment with mind-weaving, but without the enthusiasm of my earlier days. I was only too aware that whatever pleasure it gave me was temporary—and that it underlined the fact that I was not human.

• • • •

Eventually I washed up on Indian shores. It was a relief to be back; I took comfort in the small but immutable fact that I looked like everybody else. I knew the sense of belonging was illusory, but it eased my mind a little.

I took up a job as a lecturer at a college in South Delhi. Something about the slow circumlocutions of the ceiling fans, the languor of heat-stupefied students, the cool rush of air-conditioned air in the computer rooms, took me back to my own days as a young student, when I had not a care in the world and Janani was still part of my life. I used my skills with mind-weaving, crude as they were, to settle disputes, to help students understand each other. This should have given me some satisfaction, but at the end of the day when I went up to my two-room flat only the familiar despair awaited me. At times I wanted to end my life, but the same inertia that kept me from living also kept me from dying by my own hand.

Then I met Binodini.

Her mind was muscular, strong, beautiful. Its fluxes and transformations were smooth, controlled, like a dancer executing a familiar turn. Although she could not sense my mind exploring hers, I had difficulty manipulating its topography to make a meta-mind with another. There was a discipline about her that, while quite different from the high-Himalayan feel of a soliton’s mind, had a similar, if muted, effect on me—a subtle quieting, a calming. In appearance, she was a middle-aged woman with graying hair that she did up carelessly in a bun; her face was calm, her large, sympathetic eyes observant.

She taught sociology. I had seen her at faculty meetings and liked the shape of her mind; one day, when I was nursing a cup of tea alone at a stained wooden table in the café, she asked if she could join me. It turned out she was a divorced single woman without children. She did research on groups that believed in supernatural phenomena including UFO sightings.

“Do you believe in aliens?” I asked her, hoping I sounded jocular.

She smiled. “There are things I’ve come across in my research that I can’t explain. So I keep an open mind.” She looked at me over her cup of chai. “Something tells me that your question wasn’t a casual one. Is there an experience you’ve had that you can’t explain either?”

I wasn’t ready to tell her, but it occurred to me with an immense sense of relief that perhaps I had found a confidante.

Life wasn’t easy for her. She was not interested in a relationship and had to keep fending off men who couldn’t understand that. There was a controlled fierceness about her, a courage and curiosity that kept her going. She kept a little vegetable garden behind her apartment, where she grew red radishes and brinjal, and simla mirch. I still recall the color and roundness of freshly uprooted radishes in the blue ceramic bowl on her kitchen table, the crunch of her strong white teeth as she bit into one. She did an hour of yoga every morning.

“I’d be dead without yoga,” she told me. “Disciplines the mind.”

She gave me a shrewd look.

“It’s also good if you’re in mourning.”

It was then that I told her. That morning—classes had been canceled due to some unrest in the city—we’d walked off campus together, and she had invited me into her home.

She listened well. I don’t think she necessarily believed me the first time, but she didn’t disbelieve me either. To my own ears my story sounded ludicrous, but her sympathy was real, without condescension.

Later I showed her my things, the broken ceramic bits that were presumably the remains of my ship; the photos; Janani’s letters. She looked at everything with a scholar’s interested gaze, mingled with childlike wonder. When she looked at me her eyes were bright; she hugged me.

“Take me to your leader,” I said, to stop my own tears. And we laughed helplessly.

After that we spent a lot of time together. We went to movie theaters and watched bad science fiction films. We sat in the café and talked. I sensed that she was holding off on becoming intimate with me, which at first upset me. But I knew that although our friendship had brought a lightness into my heart, the despair was still there. I was still haunted by what had happened to me, and she knew it.

“You know you have to find him, don’t you?” she told me after we emerged from a showing of Antariksh ki Yatra.

The crowd was spilling out of the exit doors; my feet crunched on popcorn. A teenager was shouting into her cell phone; somewhere I smelled henna. A man looked at me from the doorway and smiled, apparently mistaking me for someone else. His face changed when I stared at him.

Outside under the neem trees it was dark, quiet. The earth smelled damp from yesterday’s rain. Tonight the stars were partly obscured by city haze and light pollution. As was my habit, I looked for the star that was my native sun, but the constellation Sapt-Rishi was lost in the haze.

“Whom do I have to find?” I said, although I knew whom she meant.

“Rahul Moghe.”

His name, unspoken for so long, sent an electric shock through me. My ghost self arose in my mind as though it had been waiting for those very syllables. I felt a great wave of fear and longing.

Over the next few days, Binodini argued with me, and ultimately I gave in. She was simply repeating to me what my own mind had been trying to tell me: that if I were to have any peace in this life, I would have to confront Rahul Moghe, to find the answers to the questions that had plagued me half my life. And then I would have to make a decision.

“All right,” I said at last. From pursued I would become the pursuer. But how would I find him?

“You’ll find him,” Binodini said confidently.

One day I confessed to her my greatest fear. What if I joined forces with Rahul Moghe and turned against humanity as he had done? “He would kill you without a thought,” I told her. “Do you want me to become like that?”

“Listen, Arun, whatever decision you make, you will still be you. Alien or human—those are just words, labels. You are what you are.”

So I went looking. Because I didn’t know where to find Rahul Moghe, I followed the trails of disasters, riots, unexplained violent events. But all these turned out to be the work of human beings alone. Wherever he was, Rahul Moghe was not trying to attract my attention.

One evening I was in a train returning from one of these trips. The Shatabdi Express was tearing through the night across the Gangetic Plain. I was in a second-class, air-conditioned compartment; my fellow travelers were asleep, but I was wide awake, leaning against the window, watching my reflection in the glass. The impenetrable night outside made the compartment seem like a cocoon, a world unto itself. Yet as the train swayed and sang in rhythm, it seemed to be singing his name.

Rahul Moghe, wherever you are, let me find you, I said in my mind, with all the fervor of my despair.

I didn’t know I had also spoken aloud. The man in front of me, huddled in a blanket, stirred; black eyes snapped open. His mind woke suddenly, but he closed his eyes and feigned sleep. There was a suitcase under his bunk, embossed in gold letters: Amit Rajagopal.

It wasn’t him. I would have known Rahul Moghe anywhere from his mind’s signature. This man’s mind seemed vaguely familiar, but perhaps it was just that he reminded me of someone at the college. I didn’t pay much attention to him because something in my own mind woke up when I made my plea.

How can I describe it?

It’s like falling asleep with the radio on very low. The sound does not disturb your sleep or your dreams, except perhaps to give them a certain haunted quality, but when you wake up it is there. So I heard his voice in my mind as it woke, calling to me very faintly across a vast distance.

“I’m coming!” I said, and in that moment there was no fear in my heart.

He would not wait but would meet me halfway. I don’t know what means he employed to travel from wherever he was, but early that morning I stepped off the train at a tiny station where this train normally did not stop. He must have arranged it by tinkering with the engine driver’s mind. The thought made me shudder. I knew this was the place.

The brick station platform was edged with lush bougainvillea bushes with red flowers. Apart from the blanket-wrapped people asleep on the platform in the early morning stillness and a small band of crows raiding the garbage, there was nobody. In the field by the station, men, young and old, squatted at their ablutions, their water pots agleam in the early sun. They watched the train go by and did their business without embarrassment. I walked through the nearly empty station house, where I smelled tea brewing. Lata Mangeshkar was singing a bhajan on the radio. I came out into the narrow lanes of a small town.

He was in a ramshackle hotel room not far from the station. Our minds met as I climbed the stairs. I didn’t have to knock; he opened the door and let me in. He was in the same form as when I’d seen him last: a wiry Indian man who seemed larger than he was. The room was dingy, with a dressing table and a tarnished mirror in an ornate brass frame. A single, sagging bed was covered with a blue, patterned sheet, and paan stains showed through the whitewashed walls. A calendar with a buxom movie star hung on the wall by the window. I could see the street below, already crowded with bicycles, and a few cars lurching behind them, honking. The air was full of the sounds of bicycle bells.

Rahul Moghe did not touch me but bade me sit on the only chair in the room.

How can I describe that meeting? Here was the being I had feared and loathed for so many years of my life, who had killed innocent people, had done to death the one human being who had loved me and cared for me: Janani. And yet . . . he was my own kind. Between our minds there were no barriers. With him I could begin to learn the lexicon of my lost language.

I touched his mind tentatively; I could have lost myself exploring its dizzying contours. But when the whole mass shifted and loomed over me like a great blue whale turning, I withdrew in panic.

“I forgot,” he said, and his voice startled me in the room. “Last time. You weren’t used to how we communicate. I should have given you more time.”

The questions and challenges I had for him dried on my tongue. It took me some time to speak. All the while, his eyes looked hungrily at me. Leopard’s eyes, burning in that gold-brown face.

“I want to know . . . I need to know more about what I . . . what we are,” I said. “Why we are here. Why you’ve done what you’ve done.”

“Let me touch you,” he said. “Not mind-to-mind, if that frightens you still, but I can’t explain things very well by speech alone. I must have contact.”

I put my hand on his arm. He shivered, and it seemed to me that his arm would change, that he would change form any moment, but he didn’t.

“You don’t know how long I searched for you,” he said. “I went all over the world . . . Then it came to me that I would have to wait for you to come home to me. All these years I have been waiting.”

I don’t know what I had expected of this meeting, but the almost anticlimactic quietness of it was something I had not anticipated.

“Let me tell you about our people,” he said. “According to the lore, when our species was still young, yet old enough to go out among the stars, we colonized several worlds, this one among them. Then our own world fell into an age of darkness and ignorance. Instead of letting each other meld and fuse and thereby achieve greater harmony, we put up barriers. We fought. We lost ourselves and our history. You must understand that a species such as ours does not record data on stone—we have no need of it. When we die, we simply rejoin the formless substrate that holds all our memories. New ones are born from that substrate with bits and pieces of the old knowledge. When we meld with another, we recover it for all of ourselves.

“When I was young, we had recovered some fragments, enough to know how to build ships again to navigate the seas of the sky. But there had been no contact between us and the colonized worlds for eons. Our history would not be complete until the colonizers came home and mingled with us. So some of us set out. I landed on this planet and began my search for our kind.”

I could feel his mind straining to speak its own language, to tell me mind-to-mind what those first years had been like. The escape from the first burning. The destruction of the spaceship. The endless wanderings from continent to continent to find the colonizers. And then, a stupendous discovery.

“The first wave of colonizers had taken over the native species as we have done on our own and other worlds,” he said. “It is a form of perspective-borrowing, where you get to see from the point of view of the animal what the universe looks like to it. But the colonizers had gone a step further. They had, in fact, joined with the mindshapes of the natives—turned native, in a manner of speaking, so that they no longer remembered who they were.

“Have you ever wondered why you found it so easy to get into the minds of the animals here? The humans, more than any other species? It is because at some level the colonizers still remember their old language. Why do you think the average human is such a messy mix of contradictory emotions? Why do you think they feel alienated, not only from each other but from their own selves?”

He fell silent.

“But why do you destroy the humans, then,” I asked, “if part of them is like us?”

The mountain ranges of his mind quivered, loomed large over me.

“Why? Why? You can ask that?”

He clutched my hand and pulled me to the bed. His hand burned as though with fever. He put his face close to mine. His eyes were empty sockets in which danced a universe of stars.

After a while, he could speak again.

“When I made my discovery, I realized I had to free our people, the first colonizers, from their bondage to this species. I could not go home; my spaceship had been destroyed. If another of our kind came to this planet, we could return on their ship, or we could put our minds together and send forth a beacon into space, a message calling for help.

“But that woman—that viper—destroyed the few who came. So I realized that there was another way.

“If I could do the right kind of mind-weave between human minds, I could project a message into space, a weak one, but enough that it could be picked up. But for that I need your help. I have not succeeded because I need another to hold the structure. It will be the largest structure ever built, at least a hundred thousand human minds . . .”

It was like making waves on a string, I realized. You need a person at each end.

“I think,” he resumed, “that this great melding of minds will free the original colonizers from their current state. They will realize who they really are. They will leave with us when the ship comes. Even if they cannot take corporeal form, we can find some way to take them with us. To go home . . .”

His mindscape convulsed when he said the word “home.” All these decades he had experienced the utter loneliness of the foreigner whose language nobody knows.

“I haven’t melded with a mind for years,” he said. “They left enough of you that I could at least get a taste of what it used to be like. You know, among our species, when we mate, nothing is hidden. We know each other as truly as it is possible to know another being. And then, when we have tired of the world and need rest, we sink into formlessness, to rise again as another consciousness.

“How inadequate this language is! Come, now, let me show you in the way that you will truly understand. I cannot tell you what it is like . . . to actually be there.”

We leaned toward each other. I could not help it. I suppose I had made the decision already that I would remain with him, two of a kind, marooned on this world. Perhaps I had hopes of ultimately being able to stop him from wreaking havoc on humankind. I don’t know. All I wanted at that moment was to know again what it meant to meet mind-to-mind with my own species.

How can I explain that need? I was trapped in this male, human, unchanging body; only with my mind meeting his could I have the freedom to transcend these boundaries. To taste all the thirty-four states and more, to soar above the barriers that humans make between each other, and between humankind and all else. To know another being in a way that surpasses ordinary intimacy. My human fears dissipated; my ghost self appeared in my mind, beckoning.

Our attention was on each other, so it startled us both when there was a thunderous knocking at the door and shouting outside. We had already drawn together; the top of his pale yellow shirt was unbuttoned and I could smell, incongruously, cologne on his skin. In that moment as we sprang apart, I saw what hung from his neck on a black thread.

It was a human finger. It looked fresh; somehow the nail gleamed pinkly, which seemed unnatural, because it must have hung on his neck these many years, a trophy. It had once graced Janani’s hand. I was sure of that.

“Fire!” shouted the man at the door. He left us and ran to the next door, shouting. Downstairs we could hear more yells, confusion. I smelled smoke.

Rahul Moghe stared fiercely at me.

“Have you led those vipers to me? Is this a betrayal, after all?”

“No!” I said. “Let’s get out quickly. I don’t know, it may just be an ordinary fire.”

But even as I said it I knew that it wasn’t so. I had been followed. That man on the train . . . his initials, A.R. Like the signature on the note that Rinu had showed me, those years ago in the Himalayas.

They must have been keeping track of me for a long time.

The lower part of the building was in flames. Men were leading cattle out from one of the rooms, which had apparently been used as a barn. Bits of straw floated in the smoke. A crowd of passersby had already collected; some were hauling buckets of water.

Rahul Moghe and I pushed through the crowds. The streets were full of people, bicycles, cattle, and noise. Like him, I wanted to find a quiet place where we could be together. The knowledge of what the string around his neck held throbbed in my consciousness.

We found an empty field behind a house that was being constructed. At this time, house and field were both deserted. Great piles of red brick lay in rectangular stacks around us. There was some kind of storage shed in the field, with a massive padlock on its wooden door. We stopped in front of it and looked at each other. His mind quivered with hunger. I nodded.

He put his finger into the padlock keyhole, thinning it into the right shape, and the lock clicked open. We went into the darkness of the hut, which was lit only by a narrow slit of a window. Inside were dusty bags of cement. I sensed a rat mind as the creature slithered away between the bags.

What I had seen, what I hadn’t told him, was that a man had slipped behind us as we left the crowds outside the hotel. One man, maybe two. The interesting thing was that they were both blanks. I could not sense their minds, nor could Rahul Moghe.

That finger. That is what stopped me from warning him.

I thought to myself: I will pull him out of the fire before they completely destroy his mind. He will be like me, then, a creature with whom I can meld my own mind, but who will no longer be able to destroy humankind. After all, this world isn’t so bad; I don’t even remember the other one. We’ll be marooned together . . .

He must have sensed some change in my mindscape; I think it was only his need of me that stopped him from probing too deeply. Perhaps he thought only that I was afraid.

“I will be careful with you,” he told me, as he reached toward me. I felt myself go under as the great waves of his loneliness and longing washed over me. Then there I was, sailing with him as though on the waves of a vast sea. He was beginning to change shape, very slowly out of consideration for me.

I opened my mouth to speak, to warn him after all, maybe, but he closed it with his own. Limbs emerged from his trunk, embracing my own body, fitting against me like no human ever could, making allowance for the rigidity of my form. How trapped I felt then, in my human, unchangeable body!

Outside, there was a muffled explosion; I saw that the thatched roof over our heads was on fire. The walls of the hut were mud and straw. People—the blanks; I don’t know how many there were—were battering the walls down. A flaring torch fell through the slit window.

And still, for a moment, he held me, our minds and bodies locked in the closest embrace I have ever experienced. Then it came to him that we were trapped.

“Help me!” I cried. Part of the roof had fallen in—fortunately not the part directly above our heads—and I could see sky through the smoke. I pulled him to this spot. We opened a bag of cement and threw it on the flames, but still they smoldered around us. Brands of burning wood were being thrown through the gap in the roof. We were choking, coughing. I thought to myself, This is how I will die, with him.

“Change form!” I cried. “Change into a bird—fly away! They are not interested in me. Go!”

“It is too late,” he said hoarsely. “Besides, I will not leave you.” We were both kneeling on the dirt floor, gasping for breath. He put his arms around me, and again I felt the great, terrible magnificence of his mind surround my own. In my arms he changed form, swiftly, dizzily: He was a horned ape, a squat, treelike monster, a giant, ameboid, tentacled beast. I felt that great mindscape shudder as though a quake was ripping through it; I saw the glory of structure and form coming apart. His face and body changed; in my arms he was human again, but he felt different, rigid, unchangeable. I wanted to pull him out of the fire before his old self died, as Janani had done for me. I called Janani’s name through my charred throat, but all around me was a wall of fire.

I saw her then, Janani, her face incongruously suspended in the fire as though she were part of it, her dark brown hands reaching out for me through the ochre flames. The left hand was missing an index finger.

When I came to, I was lying on the floor in a room. Afternoon light poured in. There was a man lying next to me, his breath warm against my neck. My arms hurt; now I saw that they were clasped tightly around the man.

A face hung over me; the person was gently trying to disengage my hands. As he did so, the man I had been holding rolled over onto his back, apparently unconscious.

It was Rahul Moghe in his permanent form. Only he looked exactly like me.

“He imprinted on you,” a voice said. I saw that there were other people in the room; the one who was speaking now was my train companion, A.R. He wasn’t a blank, but the others were.

“Janani,” I croaked. My throat felt burnt. There were tender spots all over my body. “Where’s Janani?”

A.R. frowned. “Janani has been dead for years,” he said. “That fellow—Rahul Moghe—killed her. I thought you knew.”

“But,” I began, then gave up.

Someone said “Hush; be still.” The man was a doctor; he was leaning over me, applying some kind of ointment. Soothing my burns.

“You suffered smoke inhalation and some pretty bad burns,” he said. “But you’ll be all right. We dare not take you to a hospital lest questions be asked.”

I turned my head, not without pain, to indicate Rahul Moghe. Seeing his face was a shock all over again. I could have been looking into a mirror.

“What about him?”

“He’s going to be fine,” the doctor said. “He’s harmless now.”

He was harmless all right. That great mindscape was gone, and in its place . . . a shadow. Nothing left but a ghost. After all this, I had not saved him; I had not pulled him out in time.

He stirred, opened his eyes. They were as vacant as an idiot child’s. A thin line of drool trickled down from one corner of his lips.

“Rahul?” I said, and began to weep.

Later they told me that there must always be a human holding the alien in their grasp when the fire is lit, so that the alien would take up the form of that person. In my own burning, the person had been a young friend of Janani’s, part of the network. He had later been killed by Rahul Moghe.

“How did you know where I was?” I asked my captors. I think it was the second day of my recovery. I lay on a bed, my body covered with bandages. Rahul Moghe drooped in a chair in a corner, looking at nothing.

“We’ve been . . . keeping track of you,” said the man called A.R.

A terrible thought occurred to me.

“Not Binodini?”

“Not Binodini,” he said, but I could not tell whether he was, with gentle mockery, simply repeating my words, or whether he meant that she had nothing to do with this. Was it a coincidence that she had been the one to persuade me to look for Rahul Moghe? She had connections to groups that kept track of UFO sightings. If she was part of the network, she would know that the only way they would find him would be through me.

I don’t know that I’ll ever know.

• • • •

Rahul Moghe is at a special home for the retarded. I go to see him nearly every month. When he sees me, something like recognition comes into his eyes. Sometimes he laughs; sometimes he sets up a terrible keening, like a child in pain. He can speak a few words of Hindi, use the bathroom, brush his teeth, but he cannot read. He likes it when I tell him stories, though. I tell him about other worlds and their wonders, and sometimes it almost seems to me that he is remembering.

I still don’t know if Janani is alive. A.R. swore to me that she died at Rahul Moghe’s hands all those years ago, but my memory of her face in the fire, her hands with that missing finger, is so vivid that I have trouble believing she is gone. She may think it best to stay out of my life, knowing what she’s done, what I’ve been through. If we meet someday I have no idea what I’ll say to her.

I’ve often thought about what Rahul Moghe told me that fateful morning in the hotel room: that people of our own kind came to live in and become part of human minds. I’ve read about that curious organelle, the mitochondrion that inhabits cells. It was once an independent entity, a kind of bacterium, but at some point in human evolutionary history it ceased to become an invader and instead became an essential part of something larger. If you could offer a mitochondrion its freedom, would it take it?

Now when I explore the mindscape of a human, I wonder which part is my species and which was originally human. I wonder if the ancestral memories of my species are buried somewhere in the minds of humans. Perhaps they can access these memories only in their wildest dreams. After all, in dreams you can change form; you can walk among otherworldly wonders. The other thing that occurs to me is that while humans (unlike other animals) cannot normally communicate mind-to-mind, that ability might still be latent. So, for instance, some people can tell that they are being watched, or that there is someone besides them in an apparently empty room. Perhaps these are vestigial remains of the original ability to sense and meld with other minds.

After I recovered physically, I went back to my college in Delhi, although my heart wasn’t in it. I needed to earn a living so that I could make sure Rahul Moghe was well taken care of. As for Binodini, I have not yet asked her if she betrayed me. I can sense the contours of her mind, but I cannot tell whether she would lie to me or not—her mind is disciplined enough that she might successfully conceal an untruth. Besides, if I don’t ask her, I can still persuade myself, sometimes, that she is innocent.

When I returned, she immediately understood that I had been through an ordeal; my still-healing body was proof enough. But she knew also that my mind and heart were broken, and she did not press me with questions. I told her only that I had met Rahul Moghe and that he was no longer a danger to humanity. Perhaps she supposed that I had made my choice and that it had been a difficult one. Perhaps she guessed that the possibility of her betrayal might always stand between us. But we no longer met as often as we used to.

I saw my old friend Sankaran again, some time after my return. He came to Delhi University to deliver a lecture. He was now a well-known cosmologist at an institute in Chennai, but he recognized me at once and greeted me affectionately. His wife seemed a lot more relaxed; she chatted pleasantly with me and introduced their seven-year-old daughter, a shy child with a mind as clear and still as lake water with the most interesting undercurrents. All three of them seemed happy, and despite the pain old memories brought me, I was happy for them.

He was no longer a soliton, of course. But that old curiosity, that childlike openness to the marvels of the universe, remained, as did his complete lack of pretension. He still apologized to potted plants when he bumped into them. My eyes filled with tears when I saw this; I blinked them rapidly away and laughed with him.

Perhaps the shadow of my old love was still there. We parted with promises of keeping in touch.

One evening Binodini came to my little flat. I was just seeing off some students I had been tutoring; they gave me good-natured “aha” glances when she came up the stairs. She had been worrying about my depression, she said. There was a movie in the local theater, a particularly silly science fiction movie we had not yet seen, and would I go with her to see it? I did not want to go, but I let myself be persuaded. In the hot and stuffy theater, I sat stiffly in my seat as the drama revealed itself; it was all about aliens on Earth trying to pretend to be human and failing hilariously. Another time it would have sent me into hysterical fits of laughter, but this time I simply felt the sadness come upon me like a wave. Binodini seemed to sense that the movie was not the right one; she pressed my hand as if in apology, and when I stood up to go out, bumping against people’s knees and apologizing, she followed.

It was a clear night. The neighborhood next to the theater was suffering a power failure, common in the summer months, so the stars stood out more brightly than they normally did. I looked up at the speck that was my native sun, unfathomably far away.

Binodini took my hand.

I thought of human beings, how they could be, simultaneously, friend and betrayer. Murderer, mother, lover. I, too, had loved and betrayed my own kind.

“You’re not alone,” Binodini said. “At least, not any more than anyone else.”

In that place where we paused, the neon lights of the theater and the sounds of traffic and people were both muted. Under the neem trees, the night was thick, so that the candles in the windows of the darkened houses appeared like flickering stars. I could, with a little imagination, see us as adrift in the ocean of space. Home was just a short flight away.

As we gazed up, a meteor seared a path through the black velvet sky and disappeared. A meteor, or a ship.

“Wish a wish, Arun!” Binodini said. Her voice was full of tears.

Her hand was warm in mine. She disengaged it gently, and we walked home together through the star-filled night.

© 2007 by by Vandana Singh. Originally published in Conversation Pieces Chapbook Series, Aqueduct Press. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Vandana Singh was born and raised in India, and currently lives in the Boston area, where she professes physics and writes. Her stories have earned her a Carl Brandon Parallax award, a Tiptree and ALA Honor, several other award nominations and multiple reprints in Years’ Best volumes. She has published two critically acclaimed short story collections, The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet and Other Stories and Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories, which was shortlisted for the Philip K. Dick award.  Her website is at vandana-writes.com.

EXCERPT: A Memory Called Empire (Tor Books)

Arkady Martine | 4650 words

Ambassador Mahit Dzmare arrives in the center of the multi-system Teixcalaanli Empire only to discover that her predecessor, the previous ambassador from their small but fiercely independent mining Station, has died. But no one will admit that his death wasn’t an accident—or that Mahit might be next to die, during a time of political instability in the highest echelons of the imperial court.

Now, Mahit must discover who is behind the murder, rescue herself, and save her Station from Teixcalaan’s unceasing expansion—all while navigating an alien culture that is all too seductive, engaging in intrigues of her own, and hiding a deadly technological secret—one that might spell the end of her Station and her way of life—or rescue it from annihilation.

Coming March 26, 2019 from Tor Books

Prelude

In Teixcalaan, these things are ceaseless: star-charts and disembarkments.

Here is all of Teixcalaanli space spread out in holograph above the strategy table on the warship Ascension’s Red Harvest, five jumpgates and two weeks’ sublight travel away from Teixcalaan’s city-planet capital, about to turn around and come home. The holograph is a cartographer’s version of serenity: all these glitter-pricked lights are planetary systems, and all of them are ours. This scene—some captain staring out at the holograph re-creation of empire, past the demarcated edge of the world—pick a border, pick a spoke of that great wheel that is Teixcalaan’s vision of itself, and find it repeated: a hundred such captains, a hundred such holographs. And each and every one of those captains has led troops down into a new system, carrying all the poison gifts she can muster: trade agreements and poetry, taxes and the promise of protection, black-muzzled energy weapons and the sweeping architecture of a new governor’s palace built around the open many-rayed heart of a sun temple. Each and every one of those captains will do it again, render one more system into a brilliantine dot on a star-chart holograph.

Here is the grand sweep of civilization’s paw, stretched against the black between the stars, a comfort to every ship’s captain when she looks out into the void and hopes not to see anything looking back. Here, in star-charts, the division of the universe into empire and otherwise, into the world and not the world.

Ascension’s Red Harvest and her captain have one last stop before they begin their trip back to the center of their universe. In Parzrawantlak Sector lies Lsel Station: one fragile turning jewel, a toroid twenty miles in diameter rotating around a central spoke, hanging in the balance-point between a handy sun and its nearest useful planet. The largest of a string of mining stations that make up this small region of space, a region touched by the reaching hand of Teixcalaan but not yet subject to the weight of it.

A shuttle spits itself from the station’s spoke, travels a few hours’ distance to the waiting gold-and-grey metallic hulk of the warship, deposits its cargo—one human woman, some luggage, some instructions—and comes back again unharmed. By the time it has returned, Ascension’s Red Harvest has begun ponderously to move on a vector toward the center of Teixcalaan, still subject to sublight physics. It will be visible from Lsel for a day and a half yet, shrinking slowly to a pinpoint of brightness and then winking out.

Darj Tarats, the Lsel Councilor for the Miners, watches that retreating shape: the vast slumbering menace of it, hanging like a weight and eating up half the horizon visible from the viewport of the Lsel Council meeting room. That omnipresent blotting out of familiar stars is to him just the latest evidence of Teixcalaanli hunger for Stationer space. There may soon come a day when such a ship does not retreat, but turns the bright fire of its energy weapons on the fragile metal shell that contains thirty thousand lives, Tarats’s included, and spills them all into the killing chill of space like seeds from a smashed fruit. There is, Tarats believes, a kind of inevitability to empire unchecked.

No star-chart holograph glows above the strategy table around which the Lsel Council sits at meetings: only a bare metal surface, polished by a multitude of elbows. Tarats contemplates again the simplicity of how that retreating ship still feels like such a present threat—and stops looking out the viewport, retaking his seat.

Empire unchecked might be inevitable, but Darj Tarats has within him a quiet, determined, and conniving optimism that unchecked is not the only option available, and has not been for some time.

“Well, that’s done with,” says Aknel Amnardbat, the Councilor for Heritage. “She’s off. Our new Ambassador to the Empire, as requested by said Empire, which I sincerely hope she keeps far away from us.”

Darj Tarats knows better: he’s the man who sent the last ambassador from Lsel to Teixcalaan, twenty years ago when he was still middle-aged and enamored with high-risk projects. There is nothing done with about sending a new ambassador, even if she’s already been packed off in a shuttle, irretrievable. He puts his elbows on that table, as he’s been doing for all of those twenty years, and rests his narrow chin in his narrower palms. “It would have been better,” he says, “if we could have sent her with an imago that wasn’t fifteen years out of date. For her sake, and ours.”

Councilor Amnardbat, whose own imago-machine, a precisely calibrated neurological implant which allows her to carry in her mind the recorded memories of six prior Councilors for Heritage, passed down the imago-line one to the next, cannot imagine standing up to someone like Darj Tarats without the benefit of the most recent fifteen years of experience. If she was a new member of the Council, and fifteen years out of date, she would be crippled. But she shrugs, not precisely minding the idea of the newest Ambassador to the Empire being so deprived of resources. She says, “That’s your problem. You sent Ambassador Aghavn, and Aghavn hasn’t bothered to come back here more than once in his twenty-year tenure to give us an updated imago-recording. And now we’ve sent Ambassador Dzmare with only what he left us fifteen years ago to replace him just because Teixcalaan asked—”

“Aghavn’s done his job,” says Councilor Tarats, and around the table the Councilors for Hydroponics and for the Pilots nod in agreement: the job Ambassador Aghavn has done is keeping Lsel Station, and all the rest of the little stations in their sector, from being easy prey to a Teixcalaanli expansionist agenda, and in return for this they have collectively agreed to ignore his shortcomings. Now that Teixcalaan has abruptly demanded a new ambassador, without explaining what has become of the old one, most of the Council are delaying an accounting of Ambassador Aghavn’s flaws until they know if he is dead, compromised, or simply fallen prey to some internal imperial shakeup of politics. Darj Tarats has always supported him—Aghavn was his protégé. And Tarats, as Councilor for the Miners, is first amongst the six equals on the Lsel Council.

“And Dzmare will do hers,” says Councilor Amnardbat.

Mahit Dzmare had been her choice, of the possible new ambassadors: a perfect match, she’d thought, for the out-of-date imago she’d carry. The same aptitudes. The same attitude. The same xenophilic love for a heritage that was not the heritage Amnardbat protected: a documented fascination with Teixcalaanli literature and language. Perfect to be sent away, with the only copy of Ambassador Aghavn’s imago that existed. Perfect to carry that corrupt and corrupting imago-line away from Lsel—perhaps, for good. If Amnardbat herself had done right.

“I’m sure Dzmare will be adequate enough,” says the Councilor for the Pilots, Dekakel Onchu, “and now can we consider the problem currently before the Council, namely what we are going to do about the situation at the Anhamemat Gate?”

Dekakel Onchu is exceptionally concerned about the Anhamemat Gate, the more distant of Lsel Station’s two jump-gates, the one that leads into parts of space unclaimed by Teixcalaanli hands. Lately, she has lost not one scout-ship—which could have been an accident—but two, and both in the same spot of black. She has lost them to something she has no way to talk to. The communiques sent back before those ships went dark, garbled and staticky with radiation interference, have made no sense; worse, she has lost not only the pilots of those ships, but the long imago-lines of memory that they belonged to. The combined minds of those pilots and their imago-lines cannot be salvaged and placed into new pilot-minds without the recovery of the bodies and imago-machines that had been destroyed—and that is impossible.

The rest of the Council is not so concerned, not yet, but they will be by the end of this meeting, after Onchu has played them the remains of the recordings—all but Darj Tarats. Darj Tarats has a terrible sort of hope instead.

He thinks: At long last, perhaps there is an empire larger than the Empire that has been devouring us by inches. Perhaps now it comes. Perhaps now I will be able to stop waiting.

But this he keeps to himself.

CHAPTER ONE

And from behind the curve of the large gaseous planet at coordinate B5682.76Rl, the Emperor Twelve Solar-Flare arose on the bow of her ship, and she was a radiant blaze flooding all of the void. The rays of her light, reaching outward like the spear-spokes of her throne, struck the metal shells which were the dwelling-places of human beings in Sector B5682, and illuminated them brightly. The sensors of Twelve Solar-Flare’s ship recorded ten of them, each alike to the other, and this number has not increased since. Within the shells the men and women knew not seasons nor growth nor decay, but lived endlessly in orbit without benefit of a planetary home. The largest of these shells called itself Lsel Station, which in the language of its people meant a station that both listened and heard. But the people there had grown strange, and cleaved to themselves, though they were capable of learning language, and immediately began to do so . . .

—The Expansion History, Book v; lines 72-87, anonymous but attributed to the historian-poet Pseudo-Thirteen River, writing in the reign of the Emperor of All Teixcalaan Three Perigee

In order to expedite your travel into the Imperium, Teixcalaan requests the following as proofs of identity: a) a genetic record stating your sole possession of your own genotype, unshared with clonesibs OR a notarized document stating that your genotype is at least 90 percent unique and that no other individual holds LEGAL claim to it; b) an itemized list of goods, chattels, currencies, and objects of idea commerce which you intend to bring with you; c) a work permit from a registered employer in a Teixcalaanli system, signed and notarized, with salary and maintenance information, OR a record of superlative performance on the Teixcalaanli Imperial Examinations OR an invitation by a person, governmental entity, bureau, ministry; or other authorized individual specifying your entrance and exit dates from Imperium space OR evidence of sufficient self-supporting currency . . .

Form 72IQ, Visa Application Made from Foreign Sectors ALPHABETIC LANGUAGE VARIANT, page 6

Mahit came down to the City, heart-planet and capital of the Teixcalaanli Empire, in a seed-skiff, a bubble of a ship hardly big enough for her body and her luggage both. She squirted from the side of the imperial cruiser Ascension’s Red Harvest and burned atmosphere on her planetward trajectory, which distorted the view. Thus the first time she saw the City with her own flesh eyes, not in infofiche or holograph or imago-memory, it was haloed in white fire and shone like an endless glittering sea: an entire planet rendered into an ecumenopolis, palatially urban. Even its dark spots—older metropolises not yet clad in metal, decaying urban blight, the harnessed remains of lakes—looked populated. Only the oceans remained untouched, and they gleamed too, a brilliantine blue-turquoise.

The City was very beautiful and very big. Mahit had been on a fair number of planets, the ones closest to Lsel Station that weren’t completely inimical to human life, and she was nevertheless overcome by awe. Her heart beat faster; her palms went clammy where they gripped her harness. The City appeared exactly as it was always described in Teixcalaanli documents and songs: the jewel at the heart of the Empire. Complete with atmospheric glow.

[That’s what looking at it is meant to make you think,] said her imago. He was a faint staticky taste on the back of her tongue, a flash of grey eyes and sun-dark skin in her peripheral vision. The voice in the back of her head, but not quite her voice: someone around her age, but male, and quicksilver-smug, and as excited to be here as she was. She felt her mouth curve in his smile, a heavier and wider thing than the muscles in her face preferred. They were new to each other. His expressions were very strong.

Get out of my nervous system, Yskandr, she thought at him, gently chiding. An imago—the implanted, integrated memory of one’s predecessor, housed half in her neurology and half in a small ceramic-and-metal machine clasped to her brainstem—wasn’t supposed to take over the host’s nervous system unless the host consented. At the beginning of the partnership, though, consent was complicated. The version of Yskandr inside her mind remembered having a body, and sometimes he used Mahit’s as if it were his own. She worried about it. There was still so much space between them, when they were supposed to be becoming one person.

This time, though, he withdrew easily: sparking prickles, electric laughter. [As you will. Show me, Mahit? I want to see it again.]

When she gazed down at the City again—closer now, the skyport rising to meet her skiff like a flower made of scooping nets—she let the imago look through her eyes and felt his rush of exhilaration as if it were her own.

What’s down there, she thought. For you.

[The world,] said her imago, who had been Ambassador from Lsel in the City when he was still a living person and not part of a long chain of live memory. He said it in the Teixcalaanli language, which made it a tautology: the word for “world” and the word for “the City” were the same, as was the word for “empire.” It was impossible to specify, especially in the high imperial dialect. One had to note the context.

Yskandr’s context was obfuscating, which Mahit had come to expect of him. She coped. Despite all her years of studying Teixcalaanli language and literature, his fluency had a different quality than hers, the sort that only came from immersive practice.

[The world,] he said again, [but also the edges of the world.] The Empire, but also where the Empire stops.

Mahit matched his language and spoke out loud in Teixcalaanli, since there was no one but her in the seed-skiff. “You’ve said something meaningless.”

[Yes,] Yskandr agreed. [When I was ambassador it was my habit to say all sorts of meaningless things. You should try it. It’s quite enjoyable.]

In the privacy of her body, Yskandr used the most intimate forms of address, as if he and Mahit were clonesibs or lovers. Mahit had never spoken them out loud. She had a natural younger brother back on Lsel Station, the closest she would ever get to a clonesib, but her brother only spoke the Stationers’ language, and calling him “you,” intimate-otherself in Teixcalaanli, would have been both pointless and unkind. She could have said “you” to a few people who had been in those language and literature courses with her—her old friend and classmate Shrja Torel would have taken the compliment correctly, for instance, but Mahit and Shrja hadn’t spoken since Mahit had been picked to be the new Ambassador to Teixcalaan and carry the imago of the previous one. The why of that little breakage between them was obvious, and petty, and Mahit regretted it—and it wasn’t something she was going to get a chance to repair, except by apologetic letter from the center of the Empire both she and Shrja had wanted to see. Which almost certainly wouldn’t help.

The City had come closer: it filled up the horizon, a vast curve she was falling into. To Yskandr, she thought, I am the Ambassador now. I might speak meaningfully. If I wanted.

[You speak correctly,] Yskandr said, which was the sort of compliment the Teixcalaanlitzlim gave to a still-creched child. Gravity caught at the seed-skiff and sank into the bones in Mahit’s thighs and forearms, giving her the sensation of spin. It was dizzying. Below her the skyport’s nets flared open. For a moment she thought she was falling, that she would fall all the way to the planet’s surface and smear to paste on the ground.

[It was the same for me,] Yskandr said quickly, in that Stationers’ language that was Mahit’s native tongue. [Don’t be afraid, Mahit. You are not falling. It is the planet.]

The skyport caught her with hardly a bump.

She had time to gather herself together. There was some business with the seed-skiff being shunted into a long line of other such vessels, moving along a great conveyor until each one could be identified and come to its assigned gate. Mahit found herself rehearsing what she would say to the imperial citizens on the other side as if she was a first-year student preparing for an oral examination. In the back of her mind, the imago was a watchful, thrumming presence. Every so often he moved her left hand, the fingers tapping along her harness, someone else’s nervous gesture. Mahit wished they’d had longer to get used to each other.

But she hadn’t undergone the normal process of having an imago implanted, complete with a year or more of integration therapy under the precise care of one of Lsel’s psychotherapists: she and Yskandr had had a scant three months together, and now they were approaching the place where they’d need to work together—work as one person, compiled out of a memory-chain and a new host.

When Ascension’s Red Harvest had arrived, hanging in parallel orbit around Lsel Station’s sun, and had demanded a new ambassador to take back to Teixcalaan, they had refused to explain what had happened to the previous one. Mahit was sure there had been a great deal of politics on the Lsel Council as to what—and who—to send back, and with what demands for information. But this she knew was true: she herself had been one of the few Stationers both old enough for the job and young enough not to have already been brought into an imago-line—and one of the fewer still within that group who had any of the appropriate aptitudes or training for diplomacy. Of those, Mahit had been the best. Her scores on the Imperial Examinations in Teixcalaanli language and literature had approached those of an imperial citizen, and she’d been proud of that—spent the half year since the exams imagining that she would come to the City, sometime in her middle age, once she was established, and collect experiences—attending whatever salons were open to noncitizens that season—gathering up information for whoever she’d share her memory with after she died.

Now she’d get to the City, all right: more important than any Teixcalaanli examination, her scores on the imago-aptitudes had come up green, green, green for this match. Her imago would be Yskandr Aghavn, the previous Ambassador to Teixcalaan. Who was now somehow unsuitable to that empire—dead, or disgraced, or held captive if still alive. Mahit’s instructions from her government included determining precisely what had gone so wrong with him—but she still had his imago. He—or, at least, the last version of him available to give her, fifteen years out of date—was the closest thing Lsel could provide to a native guide to the Teixcalaanli court. Not for the first time, Mahit wondered whether or not there would be a Yskandr waiting for her in the flesh when she stepped outside. She was not sure which would be easier, having one—a disgraced ambassador? A competitor for her, but perhaps salvageable?—or not having one, which meant he had died without ever giving to any younger person what he had learned in his lifetime.

The imago-Yskandr in her head was hardly older than she was, which was both helpful in finding commonality and uncomfortable—most imagos were elders or victims of earlydeath accidents—but the last record of Yskandr’s knowledge and memory had been taken when he’d last returned to Lsel on leave from his post in Teixcalaan, only five years after he had first gone down to the City. It had been another decade and a half since then.

So he was young, and so was she, and whatever advantage to integration that might have granted the two of them was belied by how short a time they’d been together. Two weeks between the courier’s arrival and when Mahit learned that she’d be the next ambassador. Three more weeks for her and Yskandr to learn how to live together in the body that used to belong to her alone, under the supervision of the Station’s psychotherapists. A long, slow time on Ascension’s Red Harvest, traversing the sublight distances between the jumpgates that were scattered like jewels throughout Teixcalaanli space.

The seed-skiff peeled open like a ripe fruit. Mahit’s harness retracted. Taking hold of her luggage in both hands, she stepped onto the gate, and thus into Teixcalaan itself.

The skyport gate had an airy utilitarianism constructed of wear-resistant carpet and clearly marked signage between glass-and-steel-paneled walls. Standing in the center of the gate’s connecting tunnel, a precise halfway between the seed-skiff and the skyport proper, was a single Teixcalaanli imperial official in a perfectly cut cream suit. She was small: narrow at the shoulder and hip, much shorter than Mahit, and she wore her hair in a fishtail-braid queue of black that spilled over her left lapel. Her sleeves, wide like bells, shaded through flame-orange at the upper arm—[Information Ministry coloring,] Yskandr told Mahit—down to the deep red cuffs that were the privilege of the titled members of the court. Over her left eye she wore a cloudhook, a glass eyepiece full of the ceaseless obscuring flow of the imperial information network. Hers was sleekly decorative, much like the rest of her. Her large, dark eyes and thin cheekbones and mouth were more delicate than was fashionable on Teixcalaan, but by Mahit’s Stationer standards she was interesting, if not quite pretty. She touched her fingers together politely in front of her chest and inclined her head to Mahit.

Yskandr lifted Mahit’s own hands to make the same gesture—and Mahit dropped the two bags she’d been carrying on the floor with an embarrassing clatter. She was horrified. They hadn’t slipped like that since the first week they’d been together.

Fuck, she thought, and heard at the same moment Yskandr say [Fuck.] The doubling wasn’t reassuring.

The official’s carefully neutral expression did not change. She said, “Ambassador, I am Three Seagrass, asekreta and patrician second-class. It is my honor to welcome you into the Jewel of the World. I will be serving as your cultural liaison at the command of His Imperial Majesty Six Direction.” There was a long pause, and then the official gave a small sigh and went on: “Do you require some sort of assistance with your belongings?”

“Three Seagrass” was an old-fashioned Teixcalaanli name: the numeral half was low value, and the noun half was the name of a plant, even if it was a plant Mahit hadn’t seen used in a name before. All of the noun parts of Teixcalaanli names were plants or tools or inanimate objects, but most of the plant ones were flowers. “Seagrass” was memorable. Asekreta meant she was not only Information Ministry, as her suit suggested, but a trained agent of rank, as well as holding the court title of patrician second-class: an aristocrat, but not a very important or rich one.

Mahit left her hands where Yskandr had put them, which was where they belonged no matter how angry she was at how they’d gotten there, and bowed over them. “Ambassador Mahit Dzmare of Lsel Station. At your service and that of His Majesty, may his reign be a radiant blaze upon the void.” Since this was her first official contact with a member of the Teixcalaanli court, she used the imperial honorific she’d picked carefully in consultation with Yskandr and the Council government on Lsel: “radiant blaze” was the epithet for the Emperor Twelve Solar-Flare in The Expansion History as Attributed to PseudoThirteen River, the oldest account of imperial presence in Stationer space. Using it now was thus a sign of both Mahit’s erudition and her respect for Six Direction and his office; but “the void” carefully avoided any intimation of Teixcalaanli claim on parts of Stationer space which were not, in fact, space.

Whether Three Seagrass was aware of the implications of reference was somewhat difficult to tell. She waited patiently while Mahit scooped up her luggage again, and then said, “Keep a tight grip on those. You are urgently awaited in the Judiciary concerning the previous ambassador, and you may need to greet all sorts of people along the way.”

Fine. Mahit wouldn’t underestimate Three Seagrass’s capability to be snide, nor her capability to be clever. She nodded, and when the other woman turned smartly and walked up the tunnel, she followed.

[Don’t underestimate any of them,] Yskandr said. [A cultural liaison has been at court for half as long as you’ve been alive. She earned the post.]

Don’t lecture me when you’ve just made me look like a flustered barbarian .

[Do you want me to apologize?]

Are you sorry?

Mahit could imagine his facial expression all too easily: arch, as calm as a Teixcalaanlitzlim, the lusher mouth she remembered from holographs of him dragging her own lips up and askew. [I wouldn’t want you to feel like a barbarian. You’ll get enough of that from them.]

He wasn’t sorry. It was marginally possible that he was embarrassed, but if he was, he wasn’t feeling it with her endocrine system.

Copyright © 2019 by Arkady Martine. Excerpted from A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine. Published by permission of the author and Tor Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Arkady Martine is a speculative fiction writer and, as Dr. AnnaLinden Weller, a historian of the Byzantine Empire and a city planner. Under both names, she writes about border politics, rhetoric, propaganda, and the edges of the world. Arkady grew up in New York City and, after some time in Turkey, Canada, and Sweden, lives in Baltimore with her wife, the author Vivian Shaw. A Memory Called Empire is her debut novel.

Book Reviews: March 2019

Arley Sorg | 2383 words

A Memory Called Empire
Arkady Martine
Hardcover
ISBN: 9781250186430
Tor, March 2019, 464 pgs

“Space opera” usually calls to mind images from Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, and so on: big ships hurtling through space, dogfights in smaller ships, protagonists who are essentially space-swashbucklers firing blasters at an encroaching enemy. In this sense, A Memory Called Empire is less “space opera” and more “space political intrigue.” It’s light on action, but the drama is delightful and layered.

Mahit Dzmare is a young, untested ambassador, given what is probably the most stressful post a diplomat from her home can have: She must liaise with the Teixcalaanli Empire. She hails from what the Teixcanlaanlitzlim would consider a backwater, Lsel Station, so she is immediately perceived as a barbarian. The Empire is a military state, and has been gobbling up territories through politics, economics, or outright warfare, couching conquest in terms which suggest they are doing the smaller political systems a favor. While Lsel remains independent, the weight of Teixcalaan as a potentially threatening presence is placed on Mahit’s shoulders. To further complicate matters, shortly after she arrives at the Empire’s capital, she deduces that her predecessor was murdered.

The drama is driven by strong stakes, interesting personalities, and social and political maneuvering. Mahit is a likeable character who is enamored of the Empire’s culture. Nonetheless, her information resources are out of date, and her knowledge of the culture, while more advanced perhaps than anyone else’s on Lsel, comes through research and study. She’s in way over her head, yet she has no choice but to dive deeper. She can’t know who her real friends are, who is planning something despicable, or if they are simply using her for their own ends. Since she is perceived as a barbarian, while she struggles to find her footing, anyone who seems to be helping her might only be amused by her floundering, having no intention of helping her at all. Meanwhile, the plot points (intrigue and conspiracy) build in complexity as the story goes on, in a way which is both deliberate and brilliant.

While the story contains a number of nice science-fictional conceits, the focus of the narrative is on language and culture. The attention to some aspects of Teixcalaanli language is more descriptive than demonstrative. For example, we are told literature—and especially poetry—is central to Teixcalaanli culture, but there are few samples in the text. Nonetheless, the confidence of the storytelling and the story details are incredibly convincing: Since Mahit has studied poetry at length, apropos to her character, she describes the compositions she encounters in terms that only someone well versed in these arts would know. The Empire itself is ostentatious, mirroring, in a sense, the complexity of their language. This elaborate and glitzy setting allows for a lot of interesting worldbuilding, which becomes clever commentary on cultural clash and the sense of personal strangeness one experiences when immersed in a very different place. What makes this even more compelling is Mahit’s fascination with the Empire’s culture. Hesitant comparisons come to mind, but anyone with a passing familiarity of global history can extrapolate potential comparisons and thereby understand just how crazy and cool this concept is.

While the writing itself is accomplished and the plot is well-constructed, some aspects of the world(s) are distracting. Many words and phrasings and concepts are reminiscent or suggestive of something specific in the real world. As a consequence, readers may find themselves struggling to place these fictional elements within the framework of their own understanding of the real world. The name Mahit, as an example, is a popular Indian name. Teixcalaan sounds potentially Aztec. At one point the characters are eating goat cheese. These details will probably not bother some readers, and many will appreciate having a protagonist that represents typically underrepresented people (especially since many space opera protagonists are white males with standard American names—Luke, for example—which go unchallenged for “cultural realism”). For me, perhaps even more so because the story is deeply focused on language and culture, these items sent me down rabbit holes which had little to do with the actual story. Given the focus, I might have had even greater objections if it had been Steve eating steak in Englaysand.

Nonetheless, A Memory Called Empire stands as a great piece of fiction. Sure, compare it to House of Cards, just to give a vague idea of the type of story being told. But understand that this story is much deeper; it does so much more than just being a political thriller. It engages in conversations about culture and self, about conquest, immigration, helplessness, and strength. On a personal level, this is about being lost in a world which will devour you, a world which you kind of love. On a larger scale, this is about all the things which have concerned us through history; more importantly, this is about those things which should concern us right now.

Ragged Alice
Gareth L. Powell
Trade Paperpack/ Ebook
ISBN: 9781250220189
Tor.com publishing, April 2019, 208 pgs

Fans of police procedurals will enjoy Gareth L. Powell’s novella Ragged Alice. Both Broadchurch and The Fall are particularly evoked: in the coastal setting of Pontyrhudd, a small town with secrets; in the protagonist, Detective Chief Inspector Holly Craig, a woman who keeps her distance, who is known for rubbing people the wrong way, and who has returned to her childhood village to solve a murder; and in the flavor of the story itself, noir-leaning, filled with cold and stormy imagery, and veering into scenes occasionally gruesome.

The prologue opens with Lisa Hughes dying by the side of a road, the victim of vehicular homicide at the hands of her boyfriend, Daryl Allen. As Lisa is dying, she is visited by an ominous presence, seen as “a movement like the twitch of a crow’s wing or the flick of a ragged cape.” Afterwards, enter DCI Craig, who has to work with the local police (who vary in helpfulness) and an assigned team while trying to advance her career as a detective. The beginning of chapter one sets the tone perfectly, with Craig examining skids in the road and explaining to the much younger Detective Sergeant Scott Fowler that not only was this not an accident, but that it was premeditated. The majority of the story from this point follows a fairly standard but entertaining crime show trajectory.

The relationship between Craig and Scott stands as a sort of centerpiece around which the rest of the story is built. On the one hand, it’s a trope (or perhaps a cliché) to have an experienced and “on the verge” senior detective matched with a junior detective, whose job from a storytelling standpoint is to pull out story details, provide a bit of tension, and maybe even serve as a litmus for morality or craziness. The characters in Ragged Alice ride the trope enough to provide that “comfort food” sense of enjoyment for fans. At the same time, both characters are infused with a number of specific, fresh details, making them stand apart from crime show counterparts. Their interactions feel genuine enough, and occasionally novel enough, that the read itself never actually feels cliché or dull. The sense of Craig’s disconnectedness works particularly well, and her internal conflicts are captivating.

Stylistically, the story unfolds with an unobtrusive literary flair. Descriptions lend to the mood, word choices and sentences are well-composed. There’s a careful artistry at work, adding much to the book without feeling overworked.

The speculative elements feel very light and, most of the time, peripheral. Arguably the story could have worked just as well as a straight out thriller, the fantastic being easily erasable, or perhaps, replaceable. Nonetheless, the storyline is well-considered, the plotting is solid, the pacing is good, and the bodies stack up in the way that they should.

After a solid build-up, and after Craig’s internal struggle and external suffering, the ending seemed rushed. A few more pages of working towards climax would have felt right, and a few more pages of dealing with the fall-out. Nonetheless, this stands as a dark, enjoyable read, familiar in the right ways, and different enough to be worth tuning in.

New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color
Nisi Shawl, ed.
Paperback
ISBN: 9781781085783
Rebellion/Solaris, March 2019, 384 pgs

Here, respected author Nisi Shawl offers seventeen original short stories, written mostly by recognizable names in the SFF industry, many with ties to Clarion West. In her afterword, Shawl discusses the fact that twenty years ago there were “fewer people of color writing speculative fiction,” saying, “This is now—a time when the anthology you hold in your hands could easily have filled multiple volumes, when I never even got to issue a public call for stories because I received plenty merely by asking the writers of color I personally know.” Thematically, there is no overt emphasis or singular message which stands out; and, as can be expected with almost any anthology, not every story landed well or resonated strongly. As a collection, it is a celebration of people of color, featuring an array of nationalities and styles and voices; better yet, most of the stories are fine examples of good fiction. I won’t attempt to cover each story, but will mention a few that stand out as favorites.

Before this, however, I must mention “The Virtue of Unfaithful Translations” by Minsoo Kang, specifically because it didn’t work for me stylistically. It’s written as a sort of history book. The style left me wanting something that felt more personal or emotional; it was a lot to chew through. At the same time, there are vivid strokes and images in a strong, confident voice. It needs to be mentioned because I sincerely believe this story will appeal to others, and that in this case, I’m just not the right audience.

Tobias S. Buckell’s “The Galactic Tourist Industrial Complex” is a fun vision of New York City in the future. There’s a conspiracy and cover-up around an accidental death, and blue-collar protagonist Tavi is caught in the middle. There’s wonderful cultural flavor at play, and an almost pulpy sort of science fiction reminiscent of The Fifth Element. It’s an easy and entertaining read, but also a sly, light-handed socio-political satire.

“Burn the Ships” by Alberto Yáñez pitches wife against husband, Citlal against Quineltoc, in a retelling of the Spanish colonization of Aztec civilization. Citlal and Quineltoc are powerhouses in their own rights, but in very different ways. They have both suffered at the hands of the invaders; they have both watched the invaders destroy everything they hold dear. After their son is killed and the colonizers’ plan to purge the remaining population is discovered, wife and husband clash over last desperate acts. It’s a visceral story, it’s primal and smart, showcasing various kinds of magic while engaging in a high-level discussion on belief and faith. Ultimately it’s a study in oppression and resistance, as well as sacrifice.

Jaymee Goh’s “The Freedom of the Shifting Sea” is a striking, shocking, and visceral ride. It’s about monster friendship and romance; it’s about transformation and longevity. It’s also a great twist on mermaid stories. It’s perhaps the most daring piece in the collection, and it’s absolutely unflinching. In these ways, this story is both wonderful and memorable.

E. Lily Yu’s “Three Variations on a Theme of Imperial Attire” is a fairy tale retelling in solid language which, at the outset, seems banal, but quickly becomes strangely fascinating, and resolves as an utterly compelling piece. This story lulls the reader at first, then engages the intellect, and eventually grapples with emotions. It’s deceptively complex and well done.

Karin Lowachee’s “Blood and Bells” utilizes familiar crime show plot points but delivers great writing, including cool language and scene details. In what feels like a near-future gangland setting, gang member Taiyo is accused of an unauthorized killing of a rival gang member, threatening to break a fragile peace. Add to this that the rival gang has laid claim to Taiyo’s child. Tension builds nicely, and the narrative leads to a satisfying conclusion. This piece requires attentive reading, and it’s well worth the time.

“Harvest” by Rebecca Roanhorse is a bloody and sensual modernization of the deer woman legend. Tansi is enraptured by a deer woman, and is driven to perform gruesome acts. This is a grizzly tale of losing one’s sense of self; but it’s also about cultural confusion, loneliness, and murderous vengeance. It’s a dizzying, stunning work of art, told in a style which is at once readable and beautiful.

While these were my favorites, most of the pieces offered stand as strong, or at least interesting. As a whole, it’s a good anthology. Shawl’s elegant note in her afterword exhorts readers to “. . . seek us out. Spread the word. Wish on us, reach for us, and yes, let us gather together in the deep, dark nurseries of stars.” The quality of the fiction gathered here should go far to encourage readers not only to seek out more by these authors, but to follow Shawl’s advice: to advocate, to search, and to wish for more wonderful stories by people of color.

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 Review: March 2019

Carrie Vaughn | 1734 words

Mortal Engines
Directed by Christian Rivers
Media Rights Capital (MRC), Scholastic Productions, Silvertongue Films
December 14, 2018

Seven or eight years ago, when steampunk suddenly became huge for a brief and shining moment, nearly every “what the heck is steampunk anyway?” type panel I was on talked about movies, and why there hadn’t really been a big blockbuster epic steampunk movie, and would there ever be a big blockbuster epic steampunk movie. We’ve had lots of steampunk and steampunk adjacent movies, from the classic Disney 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (two thumbs up!) to the wonderful and underrated City of Ember, to the ones we just don’t talk about (League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Wild Wild West, I’m looking at you). But the blazing mainstreaming of steampunk didn’t really produce the big-budget films a lot of us were hoping for. Nothing ever quite captured the aesthetic—the gears, the goggles, the clothes, the airships, and the philosophies underpinning it all—in a way hardcore steampunk fans wanted.

So when I say Mortal Engines is a few years behind its time rather than ahead of its time, that’s what I mean. This movie needed to come out in 2011; then, I bet it would have been huge. But I’m not sure the special effects of 2011 would have been up to handling what this put on the screen in late 2018. I rarely advocate going to a film just for the visuals, but this one I will. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything like it. Steampunk fans will tell you: The goggles and gears have to be functional, and they are here. Giant vehicles have treads and rivets and smokestacks that make an impact on the world. There are airships, airship battles, and a floating city. There are tailored coats festooned with medals, rogue aviators in bomber jackets and goggles galore, and commentary on class systems and colonialism. And there is mobile London, a terrifying tower of familiar landmarks made monstrous by some demented maker collective. The film has a hell of a pedigree: screenplay by Lord of the Rings vets Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, and Peter Jackson, with visual effects by Weta Workshop. These folks know how to do big and epic.

Based on the novel by Philip Reeve, Mortal Engines tells the story of a post-apocalyptic world far in the future after literal Earth-shattering weapons destroyed most of the planet. Many of the survivors gathered in cities, and the cities themselves were made mobile in order to seek out dwindling resources. Thus, we’re told in an opening voice-over, giving rise to the “great predator cities of the west” and a strategy known as “municipal Darwinism.” Is that a hook or what? The opening scene shows our heroine, Hester Shaw, looking through a telescope for . . . something. Then it appears on the horizon, a great rumbling monster on multiple massive treads, each as wide as a highway. The little town where she’s at closes up shop, starts its engines, and flees in sections, to better avoid the predator. The predator is recognizably London, with giant Trafalgar Square lions in the front and St. Paul’s at the summit. London is nominally led by the Lord Mayor, but the real mastermind behind the city and its strategy is Valentine, a sinister, calculating man—played by Hugo Weaving, naturally—obsessed with the weapons of the ancients and determined to recreate them in order to conquer the one place on Earth with enough resources to sustain London: the land behind the wall of Shan Guo. An earnest ensemble of stock characters gathers to thwart Valentine’s plans and learn the dark secrets of Hester’s past—because of her archeologist mother, she holds the literal key to stopping the weapon.

Mortal Engine’s prime reason for existing are the visuals. Mobile London is extraordinary, and the world it’s rumbling through feels whole. The landscape is cut back and forth with vast trenches of the cities’ tread marks. Londoners stand on a railing, cheering, when the tiny Bavarian town on its broken-down wheels is hooked and dragged into the great city’s maw, to be broken up for parts and fuel. This hits all the post-apocalyptic story beats as well. Almost everyone badly needs a bath. There’s an obsession with artifacts of the before time. The themes of the story are about the lessons of the past and what people are supposed to do with them. Learn from them, as every other character would like to do, or use it for his own purposes, as Valentine does.

One could criticize Mortal Engines for telling a stock, predictable story with stock, predictable characters. Along with our scruffy orphan with a dark past Hester, our other main character is Tom, a plucky historian who really wants to be a pilot. We have the rich girl who learns the Truth about her hierarchical society, and the grease-smeared working-class boy she befriends (who we don’t see nearly enough of). We have the slick amazing airship captain and her heroic band of fighters. That the villain is played by Hugo Weaving is itself stock-casting shorthand. The plot isn’t complicated—get the McGuffin to stop the Bad Guy from doing the Thing. But a story like this may be why stock characters and plot exist. No shocking twists needed—after all, the failure mode of “shocking twist” is “nonsensical.”

I think the film’s heart is in the right place. Along with opinions about gears and goggles, a lot of steampunk fans will tell you that a genre that reaches back to the Victorian era for much of its aesthetic must also confront that era’s destructive colonialism. Mortal Engines is unabashedly about colonialism. The Anti-Traction League, which opposes London and Valentine and has its stronghold behind the wall, is filled with a diverse cast of characters, and its aesthetics are Asian-inspired. And London is coming to destroy them all and take their resources for itself. Anti-Traction leader Anna Fang shows up in a vivid red airship to spectacularly rescue Hester and Tom from wasteland cannibals. She brings them to a multicultural floating city where we meet her multicultural crew of rabble-rousers and fighters. We see what’s at stake here: hierarchical, rapacious London versus everyone else who is just trying to live. It’s like this film couldn’t have come out in 2011 because it’s incorporating so much of the discussions about what the steampunk genre is and should be that have taken place over the last eight years.

The movie is trying to do a lot. Maybe too much. Along with the A-plot of trying to stop Valentine from activating the death ray and destroying Shan Guo, there’s a B-plot that starts up when a mysterious killer robot comes after Hester. Valentine releases the robot from an ocean-going prison (another spectacular visual set piece in a movie stuffed to bursting with them) so it will destroy Hester for him. We learn that (A) the killer robot is a product of the ancients, a survivor from the old days, created from an actual resurrected human who may have memories of its old life, and (B) it cared for Hester after her mother’s death. This story line could almost rate its own film, especially when it wraps up in an unexpected way (unlike most of the film’s plot beats): the robot, Shrike, has been trying to kill Hester so it can resurrect her into a robot body like itself, in the name of protecting her from emotional harm; when it realizes that Hester has found love and companionship and no longer needs protecting, it ends its hunt and, on realizing its own love for her, self-destructs. (The clockwork heart, another ubiquitous steampunk trope—I think this film has them all.) The story could have gone the obvious route of using violence to stop Shrike, but in this instance, it didn’t go the obvious route.

The film feels long in the same way that so many big-budget action movies these days feel long. It’s like they spent so much money on those special effects and action sequences, by god, we’re going to see as much of them as they can cram in. It’s not that I was ever bored. But I did want some of those fight scenes to move to the next thing a little faster.

At the same time, the film still feels underdeveloped. If the story feels stock, it may be that it doesn’t have time to really breathe. We learn that Tom wanted to be an aviator rather than a museum curator, but we never really learn why that didn’t work out. Something about the death of his parents, I think. And yet, he turns out to be crack pilot. For a brief minute I thought our heroes were going to be the group of cheerful curators Tom works with, but we leave the museum rather too quickly and nothing much is made of those relationships. We meet Kate, Valentine’s daughter, when she arrives at the museum with some research questions. But that’s mostly a ploy to put her in Tom’s path and rope her into the story—we don’t get much more about Kate except that she has to renounce her father when he turns out to be evil. She’s a pretty good stock character who gets to do a lot and helps save the day. But the movie is filled with stock characters because it doesn’t really have room to do much more.

Really, this probably should have been an eight or ten episode mini-series.

That this is a stock plot with stock characters is a legitimate criticism, but during the movie those didn’t detract from the genuine pleasure and sense of wonder of being shown a world I’ve never seen before and want to explore more. This may not be the definitive steampunk movie we’ve been hoping for, but it’s definitely steampunk, and more than that, it incorporates a lot of what has come to be part of steampunk over the last decade, the philosophical underpinnings as well as the aesthetics.

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.

Interview: Sarah Pinsker

Christian A. Coleman | 2682 words

Sarah Pinsker’s short fiction has won the Nebula and Sturgeon Awards, and she’s been a finalist for the Hugo and numerous other awards. Small Beer Press will publish her first collection, Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea, in March 2019, and her first novel, A Song For A New Day, will be published by Berkley in September. She lives in Baltimore with her wife, in a hundred-year-old house.

How does it feel to have your debut short story collection, Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea, out there in the world?

AMAZING. As I say in the acknowledgements, this was always my goal. Novels are great, too, but I grew up reading more collections and anthologies and magazines than novels, and the idea of my very own collection still makes me giddy. And the fact that I got to do this with the wonderful Small Beer Press is the cream cheese frosting on this delicious cake.

So far, you’ve had forty-seven pro-sale short stories published, online and in print. How did you choose the ones that appear in this collection?

There were a few definite inclusions in my head, and a few I knew wouldn’t make it this time, with only a dozen slots, and then a bunch on the bubble. So, um, first I made a spreadsheet. The columns after the title of the story included where it was published, whether it was available online or not, how many words, point of view, genre, and a nebulous column called “tone.” Then I color-coded everything and set about picking a rainbow. I think Gavin Grant at Small Beer said nobody had ever sent him a spreadsheet like that before, which I’ll take as a dubious distinction. He then helped with the hard decisions, suggesting some and nixing others.

The spreadsheet also helped with the sequence, but before I sent my suggested sequence, I put the first and last lines onto recipe cards, and tried to find an order that had a good rhythm, similar to when I decide on an album’s tracklist by playing the beginnings and endings of songs and try to make everything feel like a cohesive whole without sounding repetitive. It ends up being a little science and a little art.

And despite all of that, there are a bunch of stories I wish we could have included that didn’t make the cut through no fault of their own.

Memory seems to be a running theme in most of these stories. Is this something you chose consciously to write about or have you discovered over time that this is a topic that’s appeared organically in your fiction?

Organic appearance. I didn’t notice that until people started pointing it out. That said, I think we all have our themes and obsessions that we return to, consciously or not.

I really love the premise of “Talking with Dead People,” where the main character Gwen and her college friend Eliza go into business selling scale models of murder houses programmed with AI to solve unsolved murders. By asking the AI voices guided questions about what happened at the scene of the crime, it’s like they’re resurrecting lost history. Would you say this premise is another way of exploring memory?

Sure! Memory, subjective or objective, and truth, relative or absolute. There’s obviously no way to really know in some of these cases if the AI is giving answers that are true, but I like ruthless interrogation of clues, like in Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time, where a laid-up twentieth-century cop investigates Richard III’s alleged murders. And like the Nutshell forensic dioramas, which were obviously an inspiration here. I went to see them last year with a bunch of writers, and we all stood around trying to solve the murders until we realized the point of them was actually to figure out which questions we should be asking.

You also write about how people choose to remember the past or how people choose to put together a collective memory. In “Talking with Dead People,” Eliza rewrites the way things happened to her and Gwen in her memoir or she leaves out parts of their history together. Then in “Wind Will Rove,” the folk musicians aboard the generation ship choose the songs and repertoire they want saved for one of their Memory Projects. Does this come from your background of having a degree in history? And if so, are you commenting on how, for all our good intentions, our sense of history can’t ever be impartial or total because we as humans are, by nature, biased and selective?

Yes, absolutely. We see that over and over and over in what winds up in history books and whose stories get left out. How do you decide what’s worth preserving, and what’s worth passing down?

Even if the generation ship had managed to hold on to everything they’d brought, they still picked and chose what went on the ship with them. They still decided which cultures would be represented, and what languages information would travel in. People brought instruments to play, but not historic instruments. Without communication with Earth, they’ll never know if someone back home found a primary source letter in a desk drawer or a queen under a parking garage. And, of course, they are stuck reconstructing much of what they do have, which means they are again at the mercy of selective memory and the subsequent generations’ waning familiarity with the source material.

You mention in your Locus Magazine author spotlight that you have a degree in history. What field of history did you study and how did you decide to study it?

American social history. I got through all the famous dates and famous people, but I mostly wanted to know how people lived. Women in the Civil War, rather than battles. I always wanted to be a writer—I always was a writer—and I developed a theory that if I studied English, I’d read a lot of fiction, whereas if I studied history, I’d learn how to do research and anchor my own stories. I absolutely adore primary source research. Hats off to all the professors who made history come alive for me.

Music is the other major theme in your stories. You write about it as a wandering presence, whether it’s in the form of a rock musician who washes up on an island shore in “Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea,” sirens who keep sailors landlocked on an island in the eighteenth century in “No Lonely Seafarer,” folk musicians jamming on a generation spaceship who won’t live to see their destination in “Wind Will Rove,” or a queer indie band eking out a living in their bus in “Our Lady of the Open Road.” How much of these stories stem from your experience as a singer/songwriter with a band and several albums released?

Maybe not so much “No Lonely Seafarer,” but all of the others you mention cannibalize some part of my experience or my feelings about music, both as a profession and a sustaining force, even if none of the characters are autobiographical. My favorite part of writing fiction about music is the challenge of evoking the feel of something, rather than the thing itself.

In “Our Lady of the Open Road,” you write about a future where technology is driving live music underground. StageHolos, holographs of performances projected onto a stage, are replacing flesh-and-blood bands. As a singer/songwriter, is this an aspect of music technology and the future of music that you’re worried about?

We’re already seeing holographic performers. I probably do worry a little bit that people would rather see a recreation of their favorite dead performer than discover new music, but also that the technologies in our homes are getting better and people go out less and less, so that awesome bands are playing their hearts out to nobody. We’re doing that to ourselves. It doesn’t help that insurance and rising rents and gentrification make it harder for venues to stay open, and harder for them to take chances on developing artists. That’s all at the same time as the democratization brought by the Internet, for good and for bad. There are platforms for bands to be heard without having to go through labels, but it’s hard to get paid when streaming revenues come in by the fraction of a penny. I think I’ve digressed! Advances in music and entertainment technologies are both wonderful and disconcerting. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band make a holographic cameo in this story. Which bands and musicians got you interested in writing music and forming your own bands, and what was their influence on you?

I’m not sure we have enough space for this answer.

I started my first band when I was thirteen, I think? I was a big stew of the stuff my parents had listened to (the Kinks, Leonard Cohen, Dylan, Springsteen, Joan Baez, the Beatles) and the stuff on the radio and the stuff that I bought, because Rolling Stone and Spin told me to (the La’s, Robert Johnson, Matthew Sweet, the Afghan Whigs, Fishbone), and the stuff my very perceptive piano teacher turned me on to, like Patti Smith and REM. The first show I went to was B.B. King, Dr. John, and Maceo Parker. I was there to see B.B. King, but Maceo—who played with James Brown and Parliament Funkadelic—and his band just blew my mind. So much energy. That was at the Beacon in New York; I saw them again years later in a giant room and they still commanded the whole space. I’m trying to write my way into an answer to “what got you interested in writing music and forming a band” and I have no idea. I just remember doing it. Like Matt Smith’s Doctor and his fez. I play guitar now. I have a band now. I just knew I wanted to play, and that playing with others was more fun than playing alone.

What other instruments did you play before you found out that guitar was the perfect fit?

I was terrible at wind instruments; I have no wind. We lived in Manhattan; I wanted to play drums and settled on keyboard. I took lessons from a great teacher who understood that I wasn’t looking for piano, and gave me a solid grounding in rock keyboard and songwriting instead, and just rock in general. Keyboard was okay, but I didn’t really feel it. It wasn’t until my cousin gave me an electric guitar when I turned thirteen that everything clicked.

Who are some bands that interest you now and what do you listen for in their music?

There are all these amazing queer bands around right now: Manners Manners, Santa Librada, the Shondes, Karen & the Sorrows . . . they’re all great performers and great songwriters. The Afghan Whigs are still probably my favorite live band. Brittany Howard from Alabama Shakes and Thunderbitch is just amazing. Big Joanie. Thalia Zedek.

What do I listen for? Passion. Something that stirs me up, because it stirs them up or vice versa. Crashing chords. Dramatic dynamics.

Do you write while listening to music, and if so, does the music have any influence on what you write?

If I’m in a coffeeshop with music, I can let music disappear into the background along with all the great coffeeshop white noise. Other than that, though, it takes up too much of my brain. I listen to music before and after writing, but not during.

I love your shout-out to Octavia Butler in “And Then There Were (N-One),” the story about the convention filled entirely with Sarah Pinskers from different multiverses. In the alternate reality of the story, Butler is alive to continue writing her Parables series and had Parable of the Trickster published. (A very bittersweet moment for me to read.) You listed her along with Ursula K. Le Guin, Kate Wilhelm, Karen Joy Fowler, and Kij Johnson and others as influences. What about their fiction captures your imagination and inspires you to write?

I remember reading Parable of the Sower on an interstate bus hurtling down I-95 in the dark, and just marveling at the existence of the social contract between everyone along for that journey.

The authors on that list are all people whose stories and novels I find absolutely delicious. I want to take apart stories like “26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss” and “Sur” and “Speech Sounds” and see what makes them tick, and read them out loud to savor every word, and at the same time, I want to swallow them whole. They’re precise with every word, but not in a way that makes you notice the language until they want you to. And I think the ultimate commonality on that list is that they all write fiction that is both challenging and humane. Characters and situations that give the reader a view into another life, true and fictional at the same time. I think you wanted me to break them out individually, but they all inspire the same thing in me in their own ways.

There’s a thing that happens when I’m at a really good show, listening to an amazing band, and I want to be there in that moment, but I also suddenly have an idea for a song that wasn’t there a second ago, and I want to be at home figuring out the song they just inspired. My favorite authors get me similarly abuzz.

You have one new story in the collection called “The Narwhal.” In this one, a young woman named Lynette takes an odd job to ride with a lawyer who’s driving her deceased mother’s art car, built to look like a narwhal, from Baltimore to Sacramento. How did the premise come together for you?

“The Narwhal” was actually inspired by the cover painting by Matt Muirhead, whose art I adore. The full painting includes a manipulated photo of a suburban strip mall multiplex. I think I started the story with that movie theater and the idea of someone driving an art car across the country, since I love art cars. Given the choice between getting picked up by a limo and a pterodactyl for a festival once, I picked the pterodactyl. Oh! And I love secret buttons, too, so I wanted whoever was in the car to not be the car’s designer. Then I got to figure out who was in the awesome car and why. I believe that if you put two people in a car together, you can find out a lot about them. Do they listen to music? Who gets to choose it? Does either have any habits that drive the other bonkers? Is there a power dynamic at work? I love the literal and figurative baggage that people carry into road trips.

What other new writing projects do you have coming up that you can tell us about?

The big one is my novel, A Song For A New Day, which will be published by Berkley in September. I’m starting a second novel right now, and trying to get in some stories around the margins. Stories are still my first love, but these deadlines are tight . . .

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: Maria Romasco Moore

Laurel Amberdine | 543 words

Hi Maria, can you tell us how “Self-Storage” came together?

It all started with a typo. A few years ago, as part of a summer workshop/potluck, I was reading through an early draft of my friend K’s novel chapter. Her character was a security guard at a storage unit and she had meant, I think, to write something about how he enjoyed the “loneliness of storage” but she forgot the “of.”

Loneliness storage. I loved it immediately, circled it with great enthusiasm. K. Chess: even her mistakes are genius! I wrote a quick and terrible draft, summer workshop critiqued it, and then the story went through the usual process of slow accretion which my stories always do. Periods of long abandonment interspersed with feverish revision.

What is the most fun part of writing for you? How did that work out for this story?

Making myself laugh, probably. I always want to write funny. Even when I try to write a horror story, I end up looking for moments of humor or absurdity. That contrast is my favorite thing. I deeply admire writers who can pull off funny/sad, or funny/horrifying. I aspire to that balance.

In a similar way, I absolutely love contrasting the weird with the mundane. I had a lot of fun coming up with the storage requirements for various emotions, and subsequently the DIY workarounds that the main character uses to store them. Duct tape solves everything.

Is there anything in particular you want to tell readers about “Self-Storage”?

I don’t play historical miniature war games like the main character, but I’m a huge fan of board games in general. From the good clean moving-little-wooden-people-around-on-a-map fun of Concordia to the surreal-art-murder-mystery-ghost-séance delights of Mysterium, I’m there. Board games are having a revival right now, with cool new games to suit any taste, and they are honestly a great way to get out and meet new people.

That said, I’ve also lost many hours to turn-based strategy computer game Civilization, which rather sidesteps the issue of loneliness by allowing you to be taunted about the relative weakness of your empire by AI Gandhi.

This makes a great short story with the focus on one very lonely guy, but have you considered the implications for the wider world? Are there any other stories set here . . . or maybe a novel?

Well, it hadn’t occurred to me before, but this is definitely a spiritual sequel of sorts to a story I wrote when I was seventeen, the first line of which was, “Once we invented cars which ran on sadness, all our problems were solved.”

There’s more I could explore about physical belongings as vessels for emotion and about how our feelings, even in this world, affect the world around us in complicated ways. Right this second, home organization guru Marie Kondo seems to be reaching peak zeitgeist. She’s got this whole thing about holding objects and asking if they “spark joy.” That almost seems to beg for a story. What do you get from a spark, if not a fire!

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Laurel Amberdine was raised by cats in the suburbs of Chicago. She’s good at naps, begging for food, and turning ordinary objects into toys. She currently lives in San Francisco where she works for Locus Magazine. Find her on Twitter at @amberdine.

Author Spotlight: Carolyn Ives Gilman

Setsu Uzumé | 806 words

Seth is a delight from the moment we see him with his family, to his exploration of Titan. My heart went out to him when things went wrong. What was the seed for this story, and what made Seth the best person to be the center of it?

For a long time I have wanted to write a story about space exploration for the rest of us—that is, those of us who are not fighter pilots, crazy wealthy, or even physically fit. So far, space has been reserved for elites, and as long as we insist on sending wetware up there, it’s going to stay that way. But there are other ways! We don’t have to be passive observers of other peoples’ heroism, even in the short run. Seth is more or less catapulted into space one day, and events there put his career in jeopardy, but he still gets to go home to his family afterward—and that, not Heinleinian heroism, is what saves the day.

The immediate seed for the story came from a workshop I attended in China, which was focused on how to provide high-tech services most of us take for granted, such as bank accounts and credit, to people in undeveloped or rural parts of the world. I thought, “Why couldn’t we use the same thinking to democratize space exploration?”

I know there’s a lot of nuance important to this discussion and question, but Seth’s take on NASA made me wonder, is square-jawed heroism inherently regressive? What’s the shape of modern SF heroism, and is it responding to the same questions SF had five or ten years ago?

SF is a very broad field, and there are still quite a few hypercompetent heroes out there. Even female heroes get forced into this mold—tougher, smarter, harder hitting than the rest of us. Of course, they all have to “grapple with demons,” a cliché that makes me cross because it’s like a checkmark on a hero résumé. People without demons need not apply. The problem with cardboard heroes is that SF helps shape our expectations of reality. People hold real astronauts, real leaders, real expeditions up to the standards of SF, which makes it hard for them to take risks or innovate.

But on the forward edges, SF is inching ahead of reality, as it is apt to do. I think the influx of authors with non-Western roots is helping expand our image of heroism. As is the fact that women and LGBT authors feel less pressure to write SF the way it was always written. The blurring of lines between SF and mainstream by authors like China Miéville, David Mitchell, and Colson Whitehead also helps.

You have this fabulous ability to bring unexpected elements together, and push science fiction into areas that don’t get a lot of commercial attention. What are your favorite things to read? Is there an author or work you return to and think, “Wow, I wish I could do that!”

I am constantly thinking “Wow, I wish I could do that.” It’s part of the fun of reading. These days, I am deliberately seeking out work by people I haven’t read before.

The most recent book to make me envious is Sue Burke’s Semiosis. Its worldbuilding is just awesome. Before that, I read Yoon Ha Lee’s Ninefox Gambit, a book completely outside my skillset, which nevertheless kept me from minding that I was on a thirteen-hour plane flight to Beijing. Before that, it was Elizabeth Knox’s The Vintner’s Luck, a gentle and odd book I missed when it came out in the 1990s. I’m glad I rediscovered it.

You mentioned in a prior spotlight that you think of your curation work as theater, designing an experience as visitors move through the exhibit. Has this influenced you as an author, either technically or creatively?

Absolutely. Exhibits are very stripped-down experiences. You don’t have much time to set the scene, and every word, every sight, every juxtaposition has to count. Writing labels is like writing haiku. The longer I do it, the more succinct my novels and stories become. I rely more on telegraphing unstated messages and finding the one essential word rather than three almost-right words.

What can we look forward to next from you?

My next novel is a complete departure for me: a gonzo comedy about the near-term future of the United States. Honest, I want to make you laugh at the downfall of the nation state. I also have two novelettes on my desk. After that, who knows? Something completely different, I think.

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: Ashok K. Banker

Alex Puncekar | 896 words

“A Hundred Thousand Arrows” is certainly the most action-packed story out of the series so far. How did it feel to write it?

It was fun! I love writing stories that draw on Indian mythology yet turn the tale around in some unexpected way. In this story, it’s especially fun because I got to write a chase sequence and a battle both at once! So they’re literally chasing after Vrath and attacking him from behind as they try to catch him (or destroy him). That was really fun to write. Chariots and magic arrows and a demi-god who can’t be killed but can be wounded and hurt. That’s counterpointed with the larger world of the Burnt Empire and their very odd, arcane culture. It’s a mini-epic in itself and I consider it one of the best of the Legends of the Burnt Empire stories.

It’s been interesting seeing how Vrath grows up between all of these stories. He’s a fascinating character. How has it felt for you, seeing this character from his birth, growing up into a young man, and becoming this epic hero? I imagine you have some feelings about him after spending so much time with him.

Vrath is one of my favorite characters from the world of the Burnt Empire. He’s a challenging character to write, since he’s inscrutable, doesn’t display human emotions outwardly, is a demi-god, and has taken a lifelong vow of celibacy. In most fantasy stories, a vow like that would be like a red flag to an author, making you want to deliberately throw temptation in Vrath’s path time and again, if only to show his “human” side. But that’s not the case with Vrath. There’s no question of him being tempted because he’s more “other” than human. This otherness and the questions it raises about writing “other” characters is what makes him so rewarding to write.

I embrace his otherness and accept it as completely “normal” for him, regardless of how odd he may seem to our twenty-first-century eyes or even the people of his time and place. But writing the story of his birth and infancy was crucial to me to understand Vrath from within. The tough part is that I know so much more about how he’s feeling at any given moment than I can reveal to the reader. Because I’m showing not telling, and Vrath doesn’t show emotion, ever.

I think the best comparison to him in popular culture would be the character of the T-100 in the Terminator movies. Arnold’s character. He can’t show emotion either, but it’s what he does and says in context that makes our throats lump up. We attribute human emotions to him, projecting what we are feeling onto his emotionless face and heart.

Upon a Burning Throne is a massive story, in both content and scope. There’s a lot of world, characters, and story for readers to dig into. When did this project as a whole really start for you? How has it evolved over time?

I guess I’ve wanted to write this kind of epic since I was a kid and knew I was going to write epic fantasy. It took me a very long time to work up the chops to attempt it, and the experience, maturity, and skill to pull it off. I still have a long way to go, in my opinion, and someday I hope to write the epic fantasy to end all epic fantasies. But you know what Lennon said, life is what happens when you’re busy doing other things. Maybe the Burnt Empire series is that epic. Maybe not. I guess it’s my attempt, at least.

Coming to actual years, I first attempted to tackle the story in the late 1990s, then knew I wasn’t ready and discarded it in favor of what later became my Ramayana Series. In 2004, I took a second crack at it, and wrote it not as the Burnt Empire Series, but as a more straightforward retelling of the Mahabharata. But then in 2014/15, I finally waded back into it and this time began looking at it as a whole new story. I kept the bones of the Mahabharata and some characters, elements, and ideas, but I began to dismantle many of the key assumptions of the epic.

By 2016, I knew what I had was only superficially the Mahabharata but in actual fact a whole new epic in its own right. The book that you now see as Upon a Burning Throne is actually a strange offspring of the Mahabharata, the Mughal Sultanate, and Egyptian mythology, all set in an alternate world reminiscent of ancient India and Egypt, but with significant differences. The story that unfolds seems at first like the Mahabharata, but as you’ll see, it takes sharp turns by the end of the book, and in the second book, A Dark Queen Rises, the main protagonist Krushni steps onstage and the bigger story kicks off in epic fashion. At that point, even the most well-informed Mahabharata fan will know at once that Toto, we’re not in Hastinapura anymore!

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: Woody Dismukes

Nicasio Andres Reed | 912 words

There’s a restrained, spare beauty to the prose in “My Children’s Home” that’s so distinctive, and also recalled for me the nearly-but-not-quite allegorical SF/F and horror of people like Carol Emshwiller and Shirley Jackson, the sort of story that captures the moment a soft beam of light illuminates an unsettling landscape. Can you tell us a bit about any influences that you had for this specific story and its particular style of prose?

I’ve always been drawn to writing with ethereal, yet defined settings. These two qualities may seem at odds with each other, but I find this paradox fascinating. One book in particularly that I think plays with this paradox extremely well is The Impossible Fairy Tale by Han Yujoo, where the atmosphere is built far more by what isn’t there than what is. Yujoo begins the piece by describing a dog swimming down a river; however, she never tells the reader how to view the dog, what is happening to the dog, or even why a dog is relevant whatsoever. There will always be a disconnect between the writer’s intention and the reader’s interpretation, but I think if, as a writer, I can be aware of that, then I can use that disconnect to my advantage.

The story paints a picture of a system of modern cradle-to-grave slavery, and something that stood out to me in this respect was the physical absence of the people of the Bureau from the lives of the home’s characters. Communications are monitored and censored, and the robotic orderlies patrol for signs of insubordination, keeping the oppressive human element of this system at a distance, only seen during inspections, and even then the same faces each time. Could you talk about the implications of this arrangement?

I think it’s difficult for any disenfranchised minority not to become obsessed with absence. I was adopted as a young child, so for me that absence is of my birth family, my birth mother in particular. But even if you consider minority groups that deal with income inequality or gender discrimination or police brutality, people are often defined far more by what they don’t have than the things they do. Which also might contribute to my fascination with the type of paradoxical prose I described above.

In this story, it never really occurred to me that the arrangement would be any different than how I wrote it. I wanted the reader to feel isolated and alone because that is how these characters feel. The most tragic possessions the characters are robbed of are their ability to relate to other humans and their ability to be understood by others. To me these are the most crucial aspects of one’s humanity.

Another absence that stands out in the characters’ lives is the total absence of women and girls. It feels an appropriate, and chilling, way for this world to function. What led you to focus on this house of young men and their male caretaker?

Adoption, in a strange way, is a kind of surrogate family-making. I am extremely fortunate to have two parents who love and support me, though this is a complex relationship and one that is far from the status quo. Especially now that I am approaching a societally accepted age for parenting, I am forced to reevaluate these complications with much more vigor than I did when I was younger. This story was an attempt to offer an alternative to an aspect of life I think a lot of people take for granted.

In addition to that, there are so many unhealthy stereotypes of fatherhood that men adhere to when having children simply because they have never been given an alternative viewpoint. These stereotypes are not most detrimental to men either. Women and children almost always are the ones who absorb the brunt of a man’s insecurities and that is utterly unacceptable. Men desperately need to reevaluate our expectations of our familial (and non-familial) roles, if not for ourselves, then for the sake of the people we love.

The story ends as the father and D-6 sit together, a question hanging between them. The father is sick at heart, but doesn’t tell D-6 that his hope is impossible. I read as much defiance in that silence as in the father’s letters to his old love. But then again, I’m an incorrigible optimist. Do you see a small defiance in that moment of emotional intimacy?

Absolutely. I think those small, often forgotten moments of defiance are the most powerful. As I said before, the most difficult oppression these characters face is their inability to relate to and be understood by others around them. The system is designed specifically to prevent intimacy so that the subjects will more easily comply. The ending is most certainly trying to display some measure of the only defiance that is available to these characters.

What can readers look forward to seeing from you next?

I have an essay on my adoption coming out in Apex and have a few more stories and poems coming through the works. However, my main project right now is an urban dark fantasy novel about a mother and daughter living in a homeless shelter in Queens, New York.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Nicasio Andres Reed is a Filipino-American writer, poet, and essayist whose work has appeared in venues such as Lightspeed’s Queers Destroy Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, and Shimmer. Nico has gone back and forth between the US and the Philippines over the years, and is currently pursuing an MA in creative writing at the University of the Philippines-Diliman. Find him on Twitter @NicasioSilang.

Coming Attractions

The Editors | 236 words

Coming up in April, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by Caroline M. Yoachim (“The Archronology of Love”) and Matthew Corradi (“Gundark Island, or Tars Tarkas Needs Your Help”), along with SF reprints by Cory Doctorow (“To Market, To Market: The Branding of Billy Bailey”) and Michael Swanwick (“The She-Wolf’s Hidden Grin”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by Ashok K. Banker (“The Seeds of War”) and Shweta Adhyam (“A Conch-Shell’s Notes”), and fantasy reprints by Carmen Maria Machado (“Blur”) and Carrie Vaughn (“The Lady of Shalott”).

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

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: Dominica Phetteplace, Adam-Troy Castro, Violet Allen, Senaa Ahmad, Deji Bryce Olukotun, Isabel Cañas, Kathleen Kayembe, and Matthew Kressel.

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 more than 100 stories (about 700,000 words of fiction, plus assorted nonfiction). The cost is just $35.88 ($12 off the cover price)—what a bargain! For more information, including about third-party subscription options, 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)

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)

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

Wastelands: The New Apocalypse [June 2019]

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.