TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 128, January 2021

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial: January 2021

SCIENCE FICTION

The Incorruptible World
Anjali Sachdeva

The Hard Spot in the Glacier
An Owomoyela

The Memory Plague
D. Thomas Minton

On the Fringes of the Fractal
Greg van Eekhout

FANTASY

The Orange Tree
Maria Dahvana Headley

Answering the Questions You Might Have About the Kharbat
Adam-Troy Castro

The Mushroom Queen
Liz Ziemska

Frost’s Boy
P H Lee

EXCERPTS

The Unfinished Land
Greg Bear

NONFICTION

Book Review: Afro Puffs Are the Antennae of the Universe by Zig Zag Claybourne
LaShawn M. Wanak

Book Review: Heroes’ Feast: The Official D&D Cookbook
Chris Kluwe

Book Review: Never Have I Ever by Isabel Yap
Arley Sorg

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Anjali Sachdeva

Adam-Troy Castro

D. Thomas Minton

P H Lee

MISCELLANY

Coming Attractions

Stay Connected

Subscriptions and Ebooks

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

About the Lightspeed Team

Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

© 2020 Lightspeed Magazine

Cover by Grandeduc / Adobe Stock Image

https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Editorial: January 2021

John Joseph Adams | 250 words

Welcome to Lightspeed’s 128th issue!

We’re kicking off the year with an original short by Anjali Sachdeva (“The Incorruptible World”), which asks the big question: If you could design the world to your taste, what would you include, and what would you leave out? And more dangerously: What would you forget? Our other original SF short is an alien tale (“The Memory Plague”) from D. Thomas Minton that digs into the nature of identity and memory and the very worth of life. Our SF reprints are from An Owomoyela (“The Hard Spot in the Glacier”) and Greg van Eekhout (“On the Fringes of the Fractal”).

Our first fantasy original is from Adam-Troy Castro (“Answering the Questions You Might Have About the Kharbat”) that mixes vicious beasts with a little bit of physics’ observer effect.  We also have another original fairy tale from P H Lee, the chilly story of “Frost’s Boy”—it will leave you ready for a hot cup of cocoa. Our fantasy reprints are from Maria Dahvana Headley (“The Orange Tree”) and Liz Ziemska (“The Mushroom Queen”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author spotlights, and our ebook readers will get to see a sneak peek of Greg Bear’s new novel, The Unfinished Land. Our nonfiction department is reorganizing a bit, but you we’ve got three fantastic book reviews for you to dig into. Hope you enjoy the issue, and see you next month!

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 Incorruptible World

Anjali Sachdeva | 10646 words

That first autumn it felt as if the whole world had been made for them—which, of course, it had. They walked down the avenue of oaks that reached above their heads like Gothic arches, red leaves drifting lazily down to collect at their feet. Ashwin was pleased as anything and couldn’t say enough about the designers, how it was worth spending more sometimes, how you got what you paid for. Everything was just as he’d imagined it: roseate light, unseasonal butterflies, crisp air with a faint waft of frost in it. To Jade, the place was beautiful without having any special charm; she knew she could have seen the same landscape in a vidroom down the street from their apartment, could’ve had the scent of fog and bonfires pumped in and controlled the temperature from her cuff. But Ash was always a fanatic for authenticity. He didn’t care if the trees looked real if you couldn’t reach out and touch them, crumble the dry leaves in your fingers, scrape your shoulder on their bark with a careless stumble.

• • • •

The planet was small, about sixteen kilometers in diameter. Watching from the ship as they slowed for landing, Jade found the way the horizon curled across the little freshwater ocean unsettling. The ocean took up about a third of the planet—blank canvas for later expansion, if they wanted it, Ash said—with a coastline of white-sand beach all around it. The land was divided into three sections: grassland, deciduous forest, and tropical jungle. At their nexus were four city blocks. The city had been Jade’s idea. “Nature is not to everyone’s taste, you know,” she said, “and we might want to have guests some day.” She had designed the city herself, and so it was a hodgepodge of the megacities she loved, part Omaha, part Shenzhen, with traces of Mombasa and McMurdosburg and Oslo. In the middle, a single building rose up twenty stories into the air like an obelisk, though it was faced with mimicry panels that kept it blended into the surrounding sky and foliage until you were within the city itself. Most of the floors were empty—for later, she said—but the penthouse had been fitted out with furniture to match their place at home, and from it you could see much of the rest of the world.

• • • •

The city was Jade’s only contribution to the whole enterprise. When she and Ashwin had gotten engaged and Ash had decided to purchase the planet as a honeymoon escape, he had asked her to come with him to meet the designers, ostensibly so she could give her input. But it was quickly clear that in this, as in all other aspects of his life, Ash had very specific ideas about what he wanted, and she was mostly there to witness.

It didn’t matter. The whole thing seemed like a very involved pet project and she was just as happy to let him make the decisions while she dealt with the more practical aspects of their future together, arranging for their partnership paperwork and giving notice at her job; even with the prenup, she’d never have to earn an hourly wage again.

When she arrived at the orbscapers’ offices for the main design meeting, Ash was already there, poring over maps and artists’ renderings of the proposed terrain. As she entered the room, Jade was struck, as she often was, by how handsome Ash was, in spite of his strange looks. Among his obsessions was a horror of physical reconstitution, and while he didn’t complain about her treatments, he himself refused all but the most basic procedures. He had let his hair turn silver, and his dark brown skin was creased and lined. In part, she was sure, it was a power move, a look that instantly communicated that he could not be bothered to conform to others’ ideas of desirability. But more than that, she found it charming. She saw him every day, and yet she could always find something different in his face.

As she approached the table, the designer stood up and bowed. He looked to be about twenty-five, just as she was, but who knew; they could do wonders with a complete facial reconstitution these days. He was wearing the loose pants and sleeveless shirt that were practically required for men in business, the look that said, “I’m too busy being wildly productive to wear anything more complicated than this.”

“I’m Maddoc,” he said, shaking her hand and pulling a chair up to the table for her.

The office was done in a style that seemed tailored for Ash’s interests, all polished stone and biofabric, with a sheet of water running down one wall. Jade wondered if the company didn’t just whip up a new conference room for each of their high-level clients to make them feel comfortable; there was probably a room next door that was all polystericon and mirrored floors with andro-throb remixes pumping through the speakers, designed for someone with more contemporary taste. Ash glanced up and reached for her hand, which she gave him.

“We’re looking at customizations,” he said. “I’m thinking a temperature range of twenty to twenty-five during the day, maybe down to fifteen or ten at night? Occasional higher and lower points thrown in for variation, maybe some seasonal changes. It would be fun to have seasons, wouldn’t it? Rain a couple of times a week. Do we need the rain?”

“Not strictly, no,” said Maddoc. “The plants need to be watered somehow, of course, but there are a few options. We can use low-moisture plants, which will be fine with a couple of days of rain each month, but then you’re more limited in the variety you can choose. Or we can set it to rain at night, and then do a quick burst of heat in the early morning to dry things out before you start your day. Some people find that really peaceful; ‘rain on the roof’ was actually a favorite sound back in the era of single-family dwellings. But if the rain is going to bother you, we can just install subterranean irrigation, although of course that’s an additional cost.”

Ash looked at Jade, eyebrows raised.

“Rain at night sounds fine,” she said. “We’re not going to be outdoors at four in the morning, I don’t think.”

“But if we did want to . . .”

“We can also install a manual override,” said Maddoc. “If, for example, you had a night or two that you wanted to be out late? You could just shut it off for that night and it would automatically resume the next day.”

Ash nodded. “That sounds perfect,” he said, but Jade could tell he was thinking of something, judging by the way he kept pursing his lips, as if words were trying to creep out of his mouth. Maddoc seemed to sense it too, because he muted his screen and turned to look at them.

“There really are a lot of different customizing options available,” he said. “And we’re adding new ones all the time. Did you have anything particular in mind?”

Ash toyed with one of the sleek black pebbles that had been scattered on the table for decoration. “Is it possible for the planet to be sterile?” he said.

Jade looked away and closed her eyes for a moment. He couldn’t help himself, she knew.

“Do you mean the plants?” Maddoc said. “Seedless?”

“No, not sexually sterile. I just mean . . . clean. Germless. The whole planet, and everything in it.”

“Uh,” said Maddoc, “I mean, we haven’t done it before, but . . . Well, I’d have to look into the specs for that. It would certainly be very . . .”

“Expensive,” said Ashwin, speaking the word with the relish of someone with a vast supply of funds.

“Complicated,” said Maddoc. “And, yes, expensive. I mean, it would be easy enough to make the interior of the buildings sterile, but then of course as soon as you went outside you’d be bringing in bacteria from the environment.”

“And we’d need to be decontaminated ourselves,” said Ash. “But it can be done. They do it for xenonauts traveling to new planets, to avoid the risk of biocontamination. So it can be done.”

“I mean every squirrel, every tree. Every ounce of dirt and water,” said Maddoc, but his tone was changing. Jade could see he was intrigued by the idea, thrilled by the madness of it.

“Some of that would be quite simple,” said Ash. “The water, for instance. The air. It’s really the biologicals that are complicated.”

“And it wouldn’t work indefinitely. We usually build the planets to be self-sustaining, enough plants to supply oxygen for the number of aerobic organisms, enough water to create a rain cycle, a self-contained sewage plant to recycle waste. But some of that couldn’t be made sterile.”

“But for a month?” Ash said. “It could sustain itself for a month. You could use nanos to replace some of the biological functions that are essential for the short term, and then we’d just arrange some kind of a cleaning service before the next time we occupy it, some kind of re-set.”

“Right, right. Something like that.”

“Or we could just use some soap,” said Jade brightly. She couldn’t deny that she liked spending Ash’s money, but sometimes when he was in the process of making an especially extravagant purchase she found it sickening to contemplate just how little the cost of things meant to him. “I hear it’s very effective.”

Both men turned to look at her sharply, as though she’d uttered a slur of some sort. Maddoc collected himself quickly and tried to put on an air of polite interest, but Ash didn’t bother. He frowned at her and turned back to Maddoc.

“As long as we put a proper airlock system in place and nothing unsterile enters the planet when we come and go, it would remain sterile indefinitely,” Ash said. “The only things that would need to be decontaminated again for future trips would be us, and whatever we brought with us. Clothes and food—easy as anything. We could do that at home.”

Now Maddoc laughed, a burst of wonder and excitement that made Ash smile. It was obvious to Jade that neither of them wanted to be sensible about this. She glanced at her cuff for a moment as though it had vibrated, and got up from the table. “Sorry, I’ll just take this quickly,” she said, gesturing at the cuff and making her way to the door.

Ash nodded, and Maddoc managed to force his attention back to her long enough to bow before resuming the conversation. “I mean let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I’ll have to talk it over with some of the other designers. I’d like to bounce some ideas off Evelyn, in particular. But I think maybe. Well, let’s see.”

“Great, that’s all I ask,” Ash said as Jade was closing the door behind her, in the tone that meant he was certain things were going to go his way.

• • • •

They started their honeymoon in a little cottage in the forest, at the end of the avenue of trees, a place Ash had designed himself. The house looked like a seed pod made of polished wood, the corners all rounded and the windows and doors graceful curves, like something that might have grown up out of the forest floor all on its own. Aside from the bathroom and kitchen, there was only one room, with a huge bed in the middle and windows on three sides that looked out onto the woods. In the late morning, Ash cooked breakfast from whole food he’d had specially stocked for the trip, and they took a walk through the trees down to a little stream where the water ran as warm as bathwater, and swam in the big pool in the rocks.

Even Jade had to admit there was something romantic about being the only two people on the planet, and that Ash was more relaxed here. It wasn’t just being immersed in nature scenes out of some other century that pleased him; it was the sterility. To say that he was germaphobic would be putting it mildly. At home he changed the sheets on their bed every day, refused to make love unless they’d both just stepped out of the shower. He had four housekeepers who worked in shifts and followed him discreetly through the apartment, wiping down each room he vacated with disinfectant and turning cleansing UV light wands on everything that couldn’t be scrubbed.

Ash had grown up in a slum, and though he rarely spoke about it, Jade gathered he had seen some terrible things in his childhood, infections and filth that most people couldn’t imagine. The flesh of his left thigh bore a deep divot surrounded by scar tissue; the one time she’d asked him about it the look of anguish that had crossed his face had frightened her into apologetic silence. So Jade was willing to live with his obsession, to wash her hands twenty times a day and carry sterile-wrapped forks and spoons in her purse for him, because he wouldn’t trust the flatware at even the best restaurants. But it was nice to be able to forgo these things, to live like normal people, even if the place itself was surreal.

The second morning Ash was up and prowling around the cabin at some ungodly hour, when the windows still showed a deep green twilight and the birds were just starting to sing. Jade could hear him in the kitchen, chopping and measuring, and then the smell of onions frying, enough to draw her out of bed. She stood in the doorway, one foot in the kitchen, and watched him shake the frying pan as he prepared to flip an omelet. He caught sight of her mid-flip and dropped the omelet on the floor, where it lay steaming like a misplaced organ.

“I’ll get the cleaner,” Jade said.

Ash crouched down over the fallen eggs and looked at them. He scooped up the omelet, smiled at her, and took a big bite from the end, drawing out a long string of melted cheese.

Jade gasped. Ash wouldn’t eat wrapped candies if they fell on the floor. He wouldn’t share drinks with her or touch any food that had been sitting out for more than fifteen minutes. It was like seeing him eat a handful of dirt.

He stood up and walked to her. “That is delicious. Try it.” He held the omelet up to her mouth, his eyes sparkling as she took a bite and swallowed.

“Who are you? What happened to my husband?” she said.

“It’s this place. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so free in my life.”

“It is charming. But I could have done with a little less mud. And those birds wake me up at dawn every day. Could we get some quieter ones on the next go round?”

“I’m pretty sure we could get them to sing the national anthem, if you’d like.”

• • • •

As the days passed, Jade realized that Ash was almost a different person in this world, a person she liked better. The longer they stayed, the more she realized how much his phobia had impacted their lives. Things that had formerly taken an hour to do now took only minutes, because they didn’t have to observe sanitary protocols. He was never afraid to touch her; if anything he was more amorous than she was, but she could live with that. And the changes in his behavior amounted to more than just an absence of the fears that had formerly defined him. The freedom he felt spread into all aspects of his life. He was more adventurous, more energetic, pulling her out of bed into the forest at all hours of the day and night. They didn’t even bother turning the rain off most times, just roamed through the dark, windblown landscape and returned to the cottage soaked and happy to peel off their wet clothes and tumble into bed. Sometimes they didn’t get dressed for days. It was bizarre and exhilarating and exhausting, so completely different from their life at home that she often felt she was in a different reality altogether, not just on a different planet. If her nails were chipped and her feet were dirty there was no one there to see but Ash, and since he had insisted that they not have access to anything other than emergency communication there was no intrusion from the outside world to break the spell. They didn’t even venture into the other areas of the planet for the first three weeks, until finally Jade suggested that they should at least see the beach before they left; where else would they ever have the chance to be on an empty beach? They packed the transport with their belongings and set off.

The beach house was more refined than the cottage, with marble floors and blonde wood furniture polished to glassy smoothness, but it still had the rustic touches that appealed to Ash. There was no vidroom, no exerciser, and he had muted most of the house’s auto-functions. The most obvious differences were in the kitchen, which was dominated by a huge old fire stove, while the aggregator was hidden in a carved wooden cabinet like contraband.

“Honestly, don’t you get tired of cooking?” Jade said.

“I might, if it weren’t such a novelty. Anyway, I think the food tastes better.”

“I think that’s your imagination. But it does taste good. Who knew you could cook as well as the box does?”

That week was more relaxed, less manic, swimming and sunning and taking short forays into the jungle. One evening Ash came back with his arms full of multi-colored orchids, which he arranged in a crystal bowl and set on the table like a biotic firework.

“They’re beautiful,” Jade said.

“It’s a shame we can’t stay longer.”

“Paradise is only paradise when it’s temporary, dear heart. If you wanted to live like this all the time you missed your chance by a few centuries.”

He laughed. “People lived like this for about sixty years, if they were lucky. No, I’m grateful to be right where I am. All the best parts of the world available for order and all the nasty parts taken out. Anyway, I’ve never been away this long before. The whole company will probably crumble if I don’t turn up at the office on Monday.”

“Probably,” said Jade. “And I could use a few face treatments and a skin coat before I show myself in public again. We’ll come back next year.”

“Every year. We haven’t even used half of the place. Maybe we can steal a few days off around New Year’s.”

“Mmm,” said Jade.

The next day they set the house to start its cleaning cycle at noon and took their bags to the pier, where a small boat was tethered. The landing pad was about a hundred meters out into the ocean, connected to the airlock above by a sealed elevator shaft. For all that Ash had been philosophical about their departure the day before, he seemed to be in a darker mood now, one that grew worse as the day progressed. At one point he dove off the pier and swam hard to the landing pad, then turned and swam back. When he reached Jade he hooked his arms over the pier and scooped up a handful of the ocean water to drink. “I won’t be able to do this at home,” he said.

“What time did they say?”

“Two, I think. Another twenty minutes. Just enough time to get dry.” He hauled himself up onto the dock and stretched out next to her, his head leaning against her thigh, and threw his arm across his eyes. “Wake me up when they get here.”

• • • •

At sunset, Jade shook him awake. The sky had turned a vivid purple with streaks of pink and gold, and the last of the sun was sinking behind the landing platform. Ashwin sat up and took a sharp breath through his nose. “Are they here?”

“No. Do you think we got the time wrong? Could it have been two a.m.? Or maybe a different day?”

“Why would we ask them to pick us up at two a.m.? They’ve gotten the time difference wrong. Or they’re just having some kind of delay.”

“I’m hungry.”

“Let’s go back to the house. They can always come and get us once they land.”

They had dinner from the aggregator, ostrich steaks and asparagus, having already cleaned and stored away Ash’s cooking supplies. Jade couldn’t help but look out the window every few minutes toward the landing platform, but soon it was dark.

“What could have happened?” she said.

“Plenty of things. But they’d better get here soon—I need a couple of days to rest up at home before I go back to work.”

They moved to the sofa and sat looking out across the water until they both fell asleep.

In the morning, Ash went back to the pier. The landing platform was still empty. “Time to try the phone,” he said, but when they turned it on they got nothing but hissing static. Ash frowned. “It’s not supposed to go down. It’s a guaranteed signal.”

“Get that emergency beacon,” Jade said.

“I’m not sure this qualifies as an emergency.”

“Get it. This is freaking me out.”

He went to the bedroom and returned with a polished metal box the size of his fist, which he set on the table in front of them and opened. Inside were only two controls: an on/off switch and a single green button. He turned the beacon on and pressed the button. Immediately, the interior of the box began to glow a soft, pulsing blue. “It looks like it’s working,” he said.

“Now what?”

“Now we wait. It’s not for communication, just for sending a distress signal.”

“Well, that’s brilliant. How can they just leave us sitting like this?”

“Maybe they tried to call and they couldn’t get through. The phone’s still down. But it’s very unprofessional. They’re not getting the full transport fee, I can tell you that.”

Jade sighed and picked up the beacon box to examine it before setting it disconsolately down and heading for the bedroom. “I’m getting changed,” she said. “We might as well go for a swim while we wait.”

• • • •

A week later, they had eaten almost all of the whole food in the house. They spent their time at the beach, still looking hopefully out to sea for the shuttle, but all they got in return was the glare of the sun in their eyes.

They tried the phone two or three times a day, from different locations, but never with any success. The beacon box continued to throb like a small blue heart, though Jade looked at it with loathing now, rather than hope. “It might not even work,” she said. “It might be just some . . . some toy they gave us to make us feel safe.”

“There must be an explanation,” Ash said. “I only hope nothing awful’s happened at home.”

Jade stood with her hands pressed against the front window, looking out over the water. After a long time she said, “What if they never come?”

“Don’t be silly.”

“But what if they don’t?”

Ashwin stood behind her and rubbed her shoulders. “Be logical. It’s only a matter of when. And we could probably survive a thousand years in this place if we had to. There’s enough biomass that the aggregator could turn it into food for much longer than we’ll ever live. More fresh water in that ocean than we could drink in several lifetimes. We’re sheltered and clothed and very unlikely to get sick. We just have to wait it out.”

“Well, I can’t stand looking at that empty platform every day; it’ll drive me crazy.”

“Give it another week. If they don’t come by then we’ll go to one of the other houses until they arrive.”

• • • •

At last they gave in and climbed into the ground transport. They had agreed to go to the city, but headed first to the cabin in the woods to collect a few things. As the tropical foliage gave way to oak trees they saw that it was autumn again—the forest had been set up on a month-long seasonal cycle. A new crop of red leaves drifted down to land on top of the dry brown ones from the previous season. Birds and squirrels erupted here and there from the piles of downed foliage.

Jade shuddered. Before, the forest had seemed like a place of wild adventure. Now it was a nightmare. Every gust of wind shifted the landscape and the patterns of light all around her. She felt as though she had sunk to the bottom of the ocean. Certainly she could feel the weight of all those fathoms accumulating on her chest. She began to cry, the tears slipping silently down her face. Ash kissed her forehead, parked the transport beside the cabin, and went inside. Soon he emerged with his arms full, dumped their belongings into the hold, and wiped away her tears with his thumbs.

Jade took a shuddering breath and exhaled heavily. “It’s like a ghost world,” she said. “Let’s go somewhere real.”

As soon as they broke the tree cover they looked for the skyscraper, but all they could make out was the faint shimmer of the mimicry panels in the air where they knew the city was, like heat haze rising high into the sky. Near the border of the city the grass tapered off and gave way to concrete, and a moment later the skyscraper loomed over them. Jade could feel her pulse quickening as they got out of the transport and walked to the entranceway. The streets felt eerie without people and cars to fill them; the only sign of life was a row of large, leafless trees beside the building, crows drifting in and out among the branches. But as soon Jade stepped into the lobby, walked across the polystericon floors and pressed the button for the lift, she felt halfway normal. She took Ash’s hand, and they rose smoothly into the air, watching through the glass back panel as the world dropped away below them, and then the doors were chiming softly and sighing open to their own front door. She went inside and dropped her bag, turning a slow circle. If not for the view and the quiet she might have been home. She sank down on the sofa and buried her face in the upholstery. The room smelled of polymer and circuitry and calibrated air. She took a deep breath and turned over to face Ash. He was looking around as though he were lost, as if this were the strange place. Jade pulled off the ugly sneakers she’d been wearing for the past six weeks and flexed her dirty toes. “We’re going to take a shower,” she said. “And then we’re going to have sex, and when we’re done we’re going to have dinner from the aggregator. And neither of us is going to mention our ‘situation’ or the rest of this whole damned planet, not even once.” She strode to the window and looked out on the glittering sea for a moment before tinting the glass to full black. In a moment she had pulled up the central control panel, set the lighting to a rich orange glow and started a dance mix playing through the house speakers. She swayed her hips as she walked toward the bathroom, stripping off her clothes as she went. “Come on, darling,” she said, and Ash followed, stopping only long enough to pull off his socks.

• • • •

With the windows darkened and the music pumping and the aggregator producing an endless supply of food and wine, it was easy to pretend they were home, things were normal, nothing was wrong. They passed two weeks soaking in comfort, watching movies and reading and talking about things they’d never found time for before.

Jade lay on the couch smoking antique cigarettes and experimentally shaping mouthfuls of smoke as she released them toward the ceiling.

“I have to say, Ash, some of your old-fashioned amusements are nice. These are much more fun than vapes, as long as you don’t breathe in too deeply.”

Ashwin was sitting on the other end of the sofa, which curved around so that he faced her across the coffee table. “That was the point, to breathe them in.”

“But they’re so burn-y when you do. And the flavor is disgusting—is this the only flavor?”

“There are subtleties of flavor; you just can’t taste them yet. Try one of the ones with a green band next time.”

He was looking at her, talking to her, but he had leaned his head against one hand, which often meant he was thinking.

“You’re trying to figure out how to get us home,” Jade said.

“Of course I am. What else would I be doing?”

It was a fair question. Jade knew she was focused so aggressively on “relaxing” because the alternative was to fixate on the fact that they were trapped here. Every drink she downed, every stimulating conversation she engineered was just a way to avoid acknowledging it. If Ash didn’t want to play along any longer, she couldn’t blame him.

She stood up, took a final drag on the cigarette, and dropped the stub into her wineglass as she walked to the window. She stroked the glass and the tint drained away. For several minutes, Jade stood looking out at the sparkling curve of the ocean.

“We’re doing this wrong,” she said at last. “We’re focused on waiting for them to come get us. But that’s going to become unbearable pretty quickly.”

“I’m sure the transport company’s just having some kind of technical problem. But at this point we need to contact someone else. I can’t imagine what’s happening at home without me. Williams has probably named himself CEO by now.”

“That’s exactly why I don’t think anyone’s coming. The company would have been alarmed if you were a day late. By now they would have sent someone to get you themselves; the expense of picking us up can’t be anything compared to what they’re losing by not having you around. So they can’t come, for some reason. And we can’t keep spending every day waiting for them. For anyone.”

Ash didn’t say anything. Jade went from window to window, un-tinting the glass and taking in the view—ocean, forest, grassland, jungle. In the parklet across the street, the crows had gathered in a massive elm tree, and even though she couldn’t hear their harsh cries the sight of them chilled her. You could have had bluebirds, Ash. Or wild parrots. You could have had anything and you chose this. But all she said was, “Cheer up, darling. It’s your paradise after all. Mine would have had more buildings. And people. Definitely more people.”

Ash didn’t reply, and when she turned around she saw that he was crying.

“I’m so sorry,” he said.

She sat beside him and laid her head on his shoulder. “You couldn’t have known. It’s beautiful, at least.”

• • • •

Three years in, Jade found that she sometimes managed to stop fantasizing about escaping the planet for a few days at a time. They had developed a routine, which helped. She and Ash rotated between the different houses every two months—moving from beach to jungle to forest to grassland—and spent the last four months of the year in the penthouse. It created a rhythm to the year, a sense of things coming and going that kept the days from merging into an endless blur. Ash also set tasks for the two of them. Jade had insisted on equipping the city apartment with a reservoir-based internet system, a huge server that contained a copy of about five percent of the web, the most popular content, current as of the day they left home. From here Ash selected books for her to read, films to watch, heavily focused on the instructional. Before, she had never been self-conscious about her lack of education as compared to Ash, but she felt it acutely now. She knew he hadn’t chosen her for her brains. And whatever he had chosen her for—her body? her face? her willingness to indulge his flaws without comment?—was fading fast. So she didn’t object, spent long stretches of the days cocooned in blankets, reading and watching. It certainly made the years pass faster.

Sometimes Jade thought of all the people she knew, going on with their lives back home. She’d been estranged from her family and had never really warmed up to Ash’s friends, but there were a few people she wished she could see again. Darius, who ran her favorite vidroom and would always tell her about his latest romance and sometimes, on a slow day, come into the room with her, so they could pretend to be traveling together, strolling through projections of Thai street markets and Antarctic resorts. Or her friend Lizzie from high school, one of the few people she’d known from life-before-Ash with whom she still kept in touch. Lizzie had four kids and was usually too busy to see Jade, but a couple of times a year she’d pay for a babysitter and the two of them would sneak off to get a facial reconstitution together and just talk. It was strange to think of everyone still out there, living normal lives, drinking maté and buying flowers and paying bills, while she, Jade, was here in a world that never overlapped with theirs, reading from a library that grew more obsolete with every passing week.

• • • •

Ash turned his own intelligence to practical matters. He was used to working eighty-hour weeks, had nearly driven them both mad in the first few months knocking around and trying to figure out various methods to contact Earth, none of which were effective because he had so little to work with. He had taken the phone apart and reassembled it, but it produced the same soft humming sound it had before his efforts, and would not dial anyone. He had spent a long time rolling the emergency beacon in his palms before Jade took it away and hid it.

“At least leave me something to hope for,” she said. “If you break that, we’re really screwed.”

So instead he experimented with adapting the machines around them. He tried reprogramming one of the aggregators to make medicines instead of food, but found the calibrations required were too fine, the machine not designed to extract the necessary ingredients from the leaves they fed into it.

“Things are going to break,” he said to her one day as they sat in the beach house, facing the usual splendid sunset through the living room windows.

Jade shrugged in response. “Eventually.”

“Eventually could be tomorrow. Things are going to break, and we won’t know how to fix them, or we won’t have the materials to do it. We have to be prepared for that.”

“How?”

“We have to learn the basics,” he said. “What if the aggregator quit working? What would you eat?”

Jade nodded toward the ocean. “Fish?”

“There are some edible fish in the ocean, though we picked most of them for aesthetic purposes. Do you know how to fish?”

“You know I don’t.”

“We have to learn. We can hunt the squirrels and the rabbits and most of what’s in the forest biome. There are some gazelles in the grasslands, though I don’t know the first thing about how to butcher them. But we could figure it out.”

“We don’t even have a gun.”

“I know. But we can improvise some kind of weapon. Can I leave that to you?”

“All right,” said Jade, surprised at the question, surprised that he would give her such a responsibility.

The next day her video queue was all hunting-related. As she watched animals being stalked and killed and gutted, she felt a building thrill, where she had expected disgust.

As it turned out, Jade was an excellent hunter. She was naturally patient, and this turned out to be a useful skill. When she hunted she didn’t get too bothered about anything, about how long she had been sitting crouched behind a tree or how far she’d had to walk in pursuit of a wounded animal when she missed her strike. She’d developed a love of Ash’s antique cigarettes, and usually had a few of them in her pocket, housed in a sleek silver case, to smooth the edges off the long hours.

She started with a slingshot and went after squirrels and rabbits and ducks, hard to hit but likely to die if you did hit them. The first few carcasses she tried to skin ended up as a mess of severed tendons and spilled intestines; she tossed the mangled pieces to the crows, who somehow always seemed to know when she’d made a kill, and sought her out, gamboling and preening for her attention. Eventually her butchering yielded edible results. She never liked the taste of the meat, even when Ash had mixed it with vegetables from the aggregator and seasoned it and slow-cooked it, but there was a satisfaction in eating those meals, she could say that much.

It was a year before she felt ready to go after bigger game. She fashioned a spear from a branch and one of Ash’s cooking knives and taught herself to throw it accurately. When she was good enough she went to the grasslands, chose one of the gazelle, and began to track it. Every time she got near, it retreated a little more, until it came to the edge of its territory, where the wall of waving grass gave way to the sand of the beach biome. It stood looking at her for a moment and then took off across the sand, its hooves sinking into the unaccustomed terrain. Jade followed, quiet and patient, until the animal reached the sea. There, she and the gazelle stood looking at each other for a moment, before she launched her spear and pierced it through the neck. The animal leapt away, but only made it a few strides before it fell to the ground, bleeding heavily from its carotid artery. Jade kept her distance until it had died, then dragged it back from the water’s edge, across the sand to a large, flat rock, and began to remove the skin. She returned home sticky with blood, her arms wrapped around a haunch of meat.

• • • •

It was a few nights after she killed the gazelle that Ash’s stomach began to hurt, and at first she blamed the meat. Maybe she’d taken too long to butcher it, and it had turned.

“Impossible, remember?” Ash said. “There’s no bacteria to make it go bad.”

“Maybe you’re just allergic, then.”

“I probably just ate too much. I’m sure I’ll feel better tomorrow.”

But he didn’t. He was plagued by constant stomach cramps, nausea, diarrhea. He began to lose weight.

“No more hunted food,” Jade said, though she’d eaten it too and felt just fine. “Strictly aggregator meals until you’re better. It’s not as though we need to be eating this caveman cuisine.”

But months passed and Ash wasn’t better, or at least not much. Even on days when he wasn’t sick, he had a constant low-level stomach upset that killed his appetite. He forced himself to eat anyway, setting the aggregator to produce a bland, nutritious porridge, but she could see that he hated every bite. Even without reconstitution treatments, he’d always seemed younger than his fifty years, but now he looked his age, and then older. He rarely worked on his projects any more, spent much of the day just sitting on the veranda of whatever home they happened to be in, looking out at the world he had ordered. Jade found herself taking longer and longer walks, ranging across the different biomes and the seams between them, trying to smother her restlessness.

One day she came home to the forest house, their current haunt, and found him lying on the patio, his body turned away from her, a small grey-and-brown bird perched placidly on his shoulder. The bird took flight as she ran up to him, and she turned Ash onto his back. He smiled up at her and she caught her breath.

“What happens when we break, Jade? No one here to fix us, that’s for certain. Beyond my skill; probably beyond yours, too. Though I admit, you have surprised me with what you can do.”

“We have to try,” she said. “What can it hurt to try?”

“I think it’s the nanites,” he said. “The ones we used to replace the gut bacteria. They were only meant to last a few months. They’ve done much better than that, you have to admit. But mine aren’t working any more, and yours will probably give out too. Bit of a joke, really. I can’t tell you how many times in my childhood I could have died from a bacterial illness or an infected wound. Always made it through, and took to the opportunity to build a path right to this place. Clean to death.”

“There’s got to be something we could use to replace it. In the animals, or the dirt.”

“There isn’t. Trust me, I saw the bills. No expense spared. It’s the very definition of this place.”

• • • •

Ash wanted to sleep outside after that, to be outside all the time, and how could she say no? There was no reason not to: no mosquitoes, no predators, no unexpected weather. The roof of the porch kept off the rain and sun. Ash grew weaker by the day but was content. Often he would ask her to bring him something—a shell, a stone, a branch in bud—and would spend hours running his fingers along the contours of it.

“It’s a king’s world, after all,” he told her. “You couldn’t buy this kind of quiet at home. You couldn’t find this much unspoiled land.”

Jade helped herself to a cigarette and did not answer. The quiet was very much on her mind. She knew how quiet it would be once he was gone.

He slipped from her in such incremental degrees that she began to think his death would be unremarkable. He slept for increasingly long periods, waking up sometimes to tell her the long-hoarded stories about his childhood, or the early days of building his company. Sometimes he mistook her for some of the women he had been with before her, talking to her about friends whose names she did not recognize and events she had never lived through. It didn’t bother her. There was something refreshing, in fact, about slipping momentarily into those other lives, as though she had been with him all along the way.

But when she finally woke in the middle of the night and found he was not breathing, Jade felt herself squeezed by a compressive panic that caught her off guard. She shook Ash’s frail shoulders as though he were only playing a joke on her, and then, without a clear thought in her head, got to her feet and walked out into the forest. The sound of night insects filled the air around her. Back home she would never have known their names, would have spent all her days in a city where she would never even have heard them, but now she could differentiate crickets from cicadas, and hear the intermittent soft call of a barred owl. The dead leaves of six years surrounded her, more than seventy autumns gone by on the forest’s monthly cycle, the world designed for a cleanup that never came. She and Ash had cleared paths, the leaves heaped into drifts that nearly reached the branches of the trees they came from, but there was no real relief. She wanted to scream, but the knowledge that no one would hear her but birds and squirrels kept her from it.

She reached to her pocket for her cigarettes, pulled out the silver case and the lighter, flicked a flame to life and stood staring at it. Let it all go to hell, and go with it, she thought. What’s left for you? She touched the lighter to the nearest pile of dry leaves. A line of gold ran along a leaf’s edge, a small orange and blue flame licking along its surface. There was a minute where everything was silent and slow, the flame wending its way from one leaf to the next, the soft gray scent of burning rising to her face. And then things happened very fast. The pile of leaves caught quickly, and the flames seemed to suck all the oxygen out of the air. They jumped, reaching for the branches above them, and Jade stepped backward. Already, a cloud of black smoke was pouring from the leaf pile, and the next pile had caught flame, and soon another. She was coughing, choking on the smoke. Around her she could hear rustlings in the leaves, the panicked sounds of animals taking flight. She, too, turned and ran, but unlike them she knew better. Ultimately, there was no escape. The fire would burn until it reached the ocean, until it had reduced the whole habitable world to ash. At her back she could hear the crackling of branches as the fire reached up into them, turned to catch a glimpse of the trees burning like torches. Stupid girl, she thought. Stupid way to find out you don’t really want to die.

Something landed on her nose. A moment later, on the back of her neck, her arms, her legs. She swiped at her body, imagining sparks, but realized she was not burned. Jade looked up through the branches and leaves, saw the pale outlines of clouds against the stars. The four a.m. rain, right on time. She ran on as the storm gathered intensity, soaking her, subduing the piles of leaves to a slow burn and then a sizzle. She reached the house and sat by Ash’s still body, one hand resting lightly on his forehead until the sun came up.

The next day she buried him in the circle of char her moment of despair had created, tamping the dirt into place and running her hands along the blackened trunks of the trees.

• • • •

With Ash gone, something broke loose inside her. She and Ash had talked, a few years into their exile, about whether they should turn off her birth control implant and try for children, knowing it was uncertain at best that rescue would ever arrive. They’d agreed it would be foolish, and cruel. She had not doubted that decision for a moment, but suddenly she felt keenly her own isolation. It wasn’t just that she was the only creature on the planet without a companion of her own species. With no means of communicating with other people, nothing seemed meaningful. She could write sonnets, symphonies—what did it matter? Is it possible for the planet to be sterile? The whole planet, and everything in it? Her life was recursive, turning back on itself, immaterial to anyone else.

While Ash was still alive, the two of them had been playing a game: the game of home. She could see that now. Even with all her determination to let go of the life they’d left behind, she hadn’t quite managed it. As long as he’d been with her there’d been someone to perform for, some reason to wash her face, speak words aloud, eat food from plates. Someone who knew what normal was, who had carried it inside him, just as she had, to this place. This place that was now an inescapable and daily test. Figure it out, or it will kill you. Or you’ll kill yourself.

• • • •

A new game, then. The game of becoming a native to an unnatural world. She grew indifferent about brushing her teeth—no bacteria to give her morning breath, or cavities. She stopped putting the milk and meat in the refrigerator. She began to plot novel means of destruction, though nothing here, it seemed, could truly be destroyed. She couldn’t burn bodies, whether plant or animal, for fear of overwhelming the atmosphere with smoke. Burying them was just a labor-intensive means of storage. She had never realized how necessary decay was. Leave an unwanted orange, a rose on a grave—if the rabbits and squirrels weren’t interested it would still be there in a month, a year, a decade, shrunken and dried, molested by wind and rain, perhaps, but still there. The dead would pile on top of the dead until there was no more room. What she would give for a colony of carrion beetles, a pile of maggots. But of course, Ash hadn’t wanted such creatures in his paradise, and she hadn’t bothered to state her opinion. Oh, come on, as if you’d have been requesting maggots if you’d stayed for the whole meeting. You didn’t even want the crows.

One morning she woke up and knew the answer to this one small piece of the puzzle, as clearly as though someone had handed her instructions. She went to the city, got online, looked up the instruction manual for the aggregator, then headed into the forest and began gathering dead leaves by the bagful. She carried them into the little house and fed them into the aggregator, pressing the Process button again and again to separate each hopper of organic material into its constituent fibers and fats and proteins. On the next round she took the bodies of whatever dead animals she could find as well. Her revulsion, she told herself, was born of another world, a world where death meant disease and corruption and putrefaction. There was none of it here. The dead couldn’t hurt her. She picked up the little desiccated bodies and fed them into the machine. When the storage units were full she set the aggregator to produce shelf-stable, calorie-dense discs of nutrients and vitamins. They’d last fifty years in storage. They wouldn’t be a joy to eat, but they would keep her alive. You didn’t think of that, Ash, did you? A decade’s worth of food produced in a day, so much more logical than learning to hunt against the eventuality that the machines might break down. And thousands of cubic feet of dead matter consolidated to boot, shrunken down to the size of a suitcase. Straw into gold. If she couldn’t manage the alchemy of decay and rebirth, she could manage this, at least.

Still, she hunted for pleasure, and to feed the crows, who sometimes perched on her shoulder or her knee as she sat in the evenings, singing quietly to herself and watching the night come on. Some of them learned to say a few words: hello; c’mere; why, why, why? She loved them for their cleverness, and out of loneliness, and because they sometimes seemed to be the only things in the little world that did what they were made to do, sleek, bright-eyed scavengers setting flesh free from bone. She wore their feathers like charms, and sitting among them as they reeled and swirled was the closest she came to peace. They’d eat her, too, if she cut herself open one day; she was grateful for that knowledge. Whenever the temptation became too great, she would go to the circle of burned trees where Ash was buried and say to herself, Be sure. But she never was.

• • • •

Jade woke up to a soft, insistent ping. She rolled over and reached for the alarm clock, before she woke fully and remembered that she hadn’t used an alarm clock in almost ten years. She lay in bed listening, working through the possibilities: Fire alarm. Dripping water. Mimic bird. Malfunctioning electronic. But the sound seemed so close, as though it came from within the room. She listened carefully and then moved to the closet, opened the door, crouched down and swept her hand along the gap below the bottom shelf. Before her fingers closed on the soft, nubby texture of a wool sock, she knew what the sound was.

She sat down on the foot of the bed and shook the sock until it coughed up its prize: the emergency beacon, pinging away, its light shifting from blue to red with every chime. She had hidden it from Ash so long ago, it seemed she had even hidden it from herself. The small silver cube chirped and flashed in her palm. At last Jade slipped on her sneakers and climbed into the transport. She refused to do more than that, refused to believe anything momentous was in the works.

But when she arrived at the landing pad, there was already a ship there, hovering at the top of the elevator shaft. Jade felt an unexpected urge to vomit. She closed her eyes and opened them again. The ship was still there. Unsteadily, she climbed from the transport, walked to the beach, and shucked off her shoes. The swim to the base of the elevator was nothing; she had swum this entire ocean dozens of times over in the past decade. She punched the elevator button savagely, not sure whether the elevator itself was even still functional. She’d had no reason to use it, of course. No one had used it since the day she and Ash had arrived. But a second later the doors eased open and she stepped inside, looking out the glass walls at her world as the elevator rose.

When she entered the ship, the door opened into a clear box the size of a large closet, which contained a comfortable chair, a table, and a tray with tea and snacks. The room was situated within a larger room. A large, plush red ball sat in front of her, a few feet beyond the transparent wall, and a moment after she took her seat a man came in and sat on it, relaxing as the ball reformed to the contours of his body.

She could not remember his name but it was him, the same man who’d designed the planet, looking just as he had that day in the orbscapers’ office years ago. Now he wore an outfit she could not even recognize as clothing, an opaque, silvery mist that clung to his body and flowed slowly around his torso and limbs. An expression skipped across his face too quickly for her to catch, gone almost before she noticed it, but it made her stop and take stock of herself. Of course: he was unchanged, but she had aged drastically. Ten years without treatments or even a proper haircut. Not to mention that she was dirty, unkempt, wearing clothes that had been stained with animal blood and dirt on a regular basis, her hair woven with crow feathers. There was a reason she had taken the mirrors down years ago.

“Maddoc,” said the man. He leaned forward as though to shake her hand, but stopped short of touching the wall between them. “I’m sorry about the box,” he said. “We weren’t sure what your immune system would be like at this point, and we didn’t want to take any chances.” He was watching her carefully, as though afraid of what she might do next.

And Jade did find herself ill at ease. After so many years of waiting for rescue, she did not know how to react. The furnishings of the ship felt strange against her skin, and the air tasted metallic. She sat for several moments without speaking. Finally she said, “Why didn’t you come for us?”

Maddoc nodded, began to speak in a tone that suggested he had had this very conversation a hundred times before. “We wanted to. But we didn’t know where you were.”

Jade laughed before she could stop herself. “Where else could we be?”

“We didn’t know where the planet was. The location you’d chosen—all records of it were erased. And not just your planet. All of our clients’ planets. It was a very sophisticated cyber attack. A group that had apparently been gathering data on us for years without our knowledge. They even had people working inside the company, providing them with access to our information.”

“But there must have been some record,” she said.

“There were lots of records. In different locations. Systematically and simultaneously destroyed. As were the phone links. The only people we were able to find were those who had left their exact coordinates with their families, or those the designers themselves could remember the location of. And that wasn’t many.”

“But we told people where we were going. All our friends, our co-workers . . .”

“Did you? Think about it. Did you say, ‘We’re going to a newly-formed planet at these coordinates’? Or did you say, ‘We’re going on vacation’?”

Jade shook her head and didn’t reply.

“Well, don’t feel bad, no one else thought of it either. It was a catastrophe, exactly as the people who planned it anticipated. We only had clients at the highest levels of society. The terrorists waited for a time when the maximum number of clients were on their planets before they struck. So imagine, a couple hundred of the world’s richest and most powerful people, suddenly gone.”

“They wanted to get rid of us.”

“They wanted to make a statement. And they did, loud and clear. They were apprehended almost immediately, but that didn’t help much. They’d already accepted that they’d spend the rest of their lives in prison; they didn’t want a plea bargain. And our company was bankrupt soon after, which of course only complicated things; it’s hard to interview employees when they’ve all scattered to different organizations and don’t want to be associated with such a debacle. Some of them changed their names, had their faces redone, started new lives.”

“But then what happened to everyone else? The other clients?”

He looked uncomfortable then, shifted in his seat. “Some of them we found fairly quickly. Within a few months. Mostly those who were closer to Earth, or near established shipping routes.”

Jade shook her head. “And the rest?”

“Some of them were dead by the time we got there. It was years later, you understand, years of detective work. They’d fallen prey to simple diseases, or heart attacks, things that could easily have been treated at home. In a few cases there’d been a major malfunction and they’d suffocated or starved.”

“Or killed themselves,” she said. “Don’t leave that part out.”

He nodded. “Yes, that’s true. Several of them.”

“And us? How did you find us?”

“Chance. A passing transport reported a planet that wasn’t on the charts, one that appeared to be man-made, broadcasting an emergency signal. I always follow up on those leads, as slim as the chances are of finding anyone alive at this point. I’m still trying to reconstruct the whole map of the thing, find whoever’s left. Me and a few volunteers.”

He seemed about to say more, but instead he paused a moment and then asked, “You said ‘us.’ Do you mean to say that Mr. Gulmohar is alive as well?”

“No,” Jade said. “He passed years ago.”

“I’m very sorry,” said Maddoc. “I didn’t mean to—”

“What’s it like, back home?” Jade said, though the word home felt funny in her mouth, as though it cast a shadow when it left her lips. “When we left, they were worried about heavy metals contamination and increased mutation rates. And Min Lei Huang taking over the world.”

Maddoc laughed. “I haven’t thought about Huang in years. He was poisoned, shortly after you let. Everyone suspected his wife, but she’s still running the country, and the rest of the Eastern hemisphere. The other concerns turned out to be, shall we say, sideshows. You won’t have heard of Bloer’s Disease, but that’s the big problem these days. Epidemic levels in the poorer countries, and even in the upper economies, it’s getting pretty bad.”

Jade took a deep breath and nodded. “How soon will we leave?”

• • • •

She gathered a few belongings from the various houses, half of them things that had belonged to Ash. Everywhere she went she closed windows, made beds, drew shades, flipped switches to off. The emergency food disks she slung into the underbrush for the animals to eat. Finally, she grabbed her spear and headed into the savannah.

By evening she had slaughtered a trio of gazelle, loaded their bodies into the transport and driven them back to the city. She butterflied them in the street beside the skyscraper, below the elm the crows favored. The birds descended to eat, dropping from the tree like leaves of burnished lead. Jade leaned against a lamppost, and watched. “I’m leaving,” she called, again and again, “I’m leaving.” The crows looked toward her, canted their heads. Some called back to her in low, warbled cries and clicks and whywhywhys. She knew they didn’t understand her words, but maybe something of the meaning came through. And anyway, she wanted to say it.

• • • •

The next day Jade stood on the surface of her planet for the last time. She paced down the avenue of oaks that marked the heart of the forest biome, heading toward the house. How strange to imagine the version of herself who’d arrived here, young and careless. How eagerly she and Ash had mounted those steps, sequestered themselves in that little cottage.

But even as she walked through the world, she was already gone from it, encased in the sealed and filtered suit that she would wear for the duration of her trip back to Earth, whenever she left the confines of the small bedroom the crew had sterilized for her. Once she had access to full medical care, she’d been assured, they could slowly expose her to other people and deal with any resulting illnesses as they arose. “You still have an immune system, after all,” Maddoc had said. “It’s just a decade out of date.”

She walked to the place where Ash was buried. Most evidence of the fire she’d started the night he died was long gone, subsumed beneath subsequent years’ growth, but a ring of black tree trunks still marked the spot. She knelt in the undergrowth there and with her clumsy, gloved hands she unsealed the container she’d brought from the ship. It was filled with detritus she’d asked the crew to collect for her: yogurt cups, used tissues, fruit peelings, scraps of meat. Common trash, rich with invisible possibility. She dumped it out and heaped dirt over the refuse. The four a.m. rains would water it.

She knew it was possible that nothing would happen. That the spot would turn dry and sterile like everything else in this landscape. But she hoped not. She hoped the invisible microbes would reach out, expand, contaminate all they touched. Turn fur and feather and the delicate architecture of leaves into rot, into dirt, into the possibility of something new. She imagined, the whole way back to Earth, that blessed contagion—the planet coming to life at last.

©2021 by Anjali Sachdeva.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Anjali Sachdeva is the author of the story collection All the Names They Used for God, winner of the 2019 Chautauqua Prize and an NPR Best Book of 2018. The New York Times Book Review called the book “strange and wonderful,” and Roxane Gay called it, “One of the best collections I’ve ever read. Every single story is a stand out.” Sachdeva’s most recent fiction has been published in McSweeney’s Quarterly and The Fairy Tale Review, and is forthcoming in the MIT Technology Review. She teaches at the University of Pittsburgh and in the low-residency MFA program at Randolph College, and will be an instructor at the 2021 Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop.

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

The Hard Spot in the Glacier

An Owomoyela | 3419 words

Ayo lost all sense of time: The white roaring was her world, the avalanche was her only orientation, and every heartbeat came as a surprise. When the world stopped moving, it was like being born to a new reality.

Slowly, she came back to herself, and the world turned to sense again.

She was on her back. At an angle—steep. Most of her view up was obscured by glacier, luminous with reflected Saturnlight. The black sky beyond it was a ribbon, whereas before it had been a wide plane.

Braced across that ribbon, a purer white than the ice around it, stood the centipede.

She groaned. “Am I alive?”

The centipede’s head turned toward her, which caused its foremost segment to shift in counterbalance. Ayo braced herself; ice was still falling in haphazard cascades in her peripheral vision. The ice under her body felt solid, though. The centipede’s legs had dug into it, and didn’t seem to be slipping.

Ayo’s question made its way into the centipede’s CPU, where it was parsed, matched to the nearest semantic rubrics, evaluated, and turned into an answer. ((Your biomonitors aren’t reporting any injuries. Your exoskeleton reports no major damage. Do you feel okay?))

She hadn’t been inside the centipede when the quake hit. Stupid, maybe, but the centipede’s interior hadn’t been designed for passengers in any case: The interior was supposed to haul cargo, the manual cockpit at the head was just big enough to sit in if you didn’t care about leg cramps, and the medical pods fitted in the rear segments made those segments visibly oversized just so a patient could be immobilized lying straight.

Everyone in Search & Rescue got the speech about remaining in their vehicle while traversing the terrain. And everyone who was assigned a centipede for their vehicle quietly decided that they knew better, and requisitioned an exoskeleton to go with it.

Ayo flexed her fingers, swiveled her ankles. The exoskeleton had protected her limbs and her spine. The helmet had protected her skull. A leaden feeling rested in the pit of her stomach, but that was no injury—that was just her, and the situation, and she ignored it as best she could. No suit integrity warnings appeared in her HUD, just as the centipede said. She felt shaken, physically disoriented, maybe on the edges of a concussion, but mostly clear-thinking.

“Status,” she said. Her mask picked it up, fed it to the centipede, and caught the reply.

((I’m uninjured. I’ve lost contact with Carpenter Base, though.))

Ayo squinted. The centipede sounded petulant, which bothered her. In theory, its emotional inflections were supposed to increase the density of information it relayed: If its voice sounded scared, the operator didn’t need to know percent chances of damage, calculated likelihood of injury—all the dry, bloodless details that were challenging for a human intelligence to weigh. If it fidgeted its many legs and strained to go forward on the landscape, the operator didn’t have to go down a list of subsystems status and topographical charts; she’d just know they were good to go.

But while Ayo had no trouble reading actual human people, she couldn’t stop second-guessing the programmed humanity of the centipede. What the hell was petulance supposed to tell her? Or was she misreading it, missing something else? Was it concerned? Afraid? Reluctant to go on?

She’d rather have the dry data, honestly. Between herself and the centipede, one of them was actually supposed to have feelings about all this, and those were more than enough to deal with.

“What about Parker?”

The centipede moved. Its mandibles opened, revealing the backup radio receiver it held protected there. Its head swayed from side to side, scanning the landscape.

((I’ve still got Parker’s automated signal. Nothing personal.))

Nothing to indicate that the target of this little expedition was conscious and trying to communicate, then. Hell, he could be dead already, for all she knew.

Dead, or lying unconscious, or lying injured. No conclusive evidence either way. Her job was to take the evidence she had and treat it as actionable.

Ayo reached out, and the centipede gave her one of its forward articulator arms to help her up. The exoskeleton she wore compensated for her own unsteady balance, bracing her until she found the faint pull of real gravity. It ran counter to the absurdly tilted landscape.

“I thought this area was supposed to be glaciologically stable,” Ayo said, shaking out one leg, then the other. Her imagination, or were the knee joints on the exoskeleton stiff? Were her own knees?

The centipede didn’t have a canned response to that. And without a connection back to Carpenter, it couldn’t build one from a report. It remained silent.

Ayo turned, carefully, looking for the bright spot on her HUD that indicated Parker’s signal. One hip ached, but dully. The topography spread down below her, crisscrossed with new rills and ridges and crevices; off in the distance, a plume of ice and vapor rose kilometers into the sky, ever feeding vapor into Saturn’s rings. Enceladus was a moon in the long process of bleeding itself away.

But the process was long enough for people to set down on the surface, make bases there, make the place home. Ignore the moon’s long attrition, interspersed with its sudden violence.

Humans would colonize anything.

She turned again, surveying the way back, taking inventory of the aches in her skull. Her HUD still provided a dot for Carpenter Base, but without a signal, it was grayed out—an approximation. Line-of-sight was blocked by the vast wall of ice that reared up behind her, which jutted out above her. It looked looser than Ayo was comfortable with. Looser than the ice underfoot; certainly looser than could support, say, a centipede crawling up its underside.

“What do I do?” she muttered, mostly to herself.

She was surprised when the centipede answered.

((I don’t like this. I think we should go home. ))

Irrationally—because she’d had the same thought, after all—Ayo felt a surge of anger. She was out here, and she wasn’t complaining. What right did this idiot piece of equipment have?

But it wasn’t programmed to complain. It was programmed to make a threat assessment and deliver it in an emotionally relatable way.

“We can’t go home without Parker,” she said.

She turned back to the beacon in her HUD. No change; no response. Parker might be dead, she thought. Then she was angry for thinking it.

“Okay,” she said, and turned her attention to the centipede. “What’s your impression of the landscape? What’s the fastest route back into contact with Carpenter?”

It thought about that. ((A lateral path, about a kilometer and a half. That will get us to an upward grade that should be stable. Assuming there’s no further activity.)) Seismic activity, it meant. ((The longer we’re out, the more risk.))

“Any pattern to the shocks?” She walked around the centipede’s head, hands spread for balance, even though the exoskeleton was perfectly capable of balancing her on its own. Technology could augment human instinct all it wanted; the instincts themselves held on, stubbornly vestigial.

((I’d guess that Parker’s incident was a foreshock. If this quake was the main shock, the aftershocks might be less severe. If not, it may get worse. In any case, I don’t think the sequence is over.))

Ayo let out a gust of air. Her suit was too well-regulated for it to cloud her HUD, but she could still feel the air hitting the screen and rolling back around her face, as though the screen itself shared in her frustration.

I’d guess. If. Might. Don’t think. She’d have to build her response on a bed of no good information. “What’s the best route to Parker?”

The centipede definitely sounded unhappy about that. ((Down. We can follow one of the valleys to a plain, and traverse that. It might take another hour.))

An hour in which anything can happen. Ayo nodded, trying to trick herself into feeling more confidence than she felt. What’s the trade?

Best case, they got to Parker and brought him home alive. Two lives preserved. Bad case, they got to Parker and he was dead already, and Ayo took the centipede home. Worse case, they got to Parker and got stuck there, or were taken out en route: two lives in extremis or lost already. Worst case, they foundered out here and another S&R team was dispatched to find them.

Best case for turning around: They got home. One life preserved. One abandoned, dead body forgotten or living body left to die on the ice sheets. And one more failure to rob Ayo’s sleep.

“We have to try.”

((I don’t think this is a good idea.))

“Centipede . . .” Ayo scowled. “Cease emotive feedback. Shut up.”

The centipede’s next words were flat, machinelike. ((Emotive feedback suspended.))

It made Ayo unaccountably angrier.

Maybe I’m jealous that I can’t turn my own emotions off.

Maybe I just wonder why we bother giving the things survival instincts if we’re going to ignore them anyway?

• • • •

The sky above Enceladus was black.

The sky above Enceladus was always black. The moon didn’t have enough atmosphere to scatter light or capture it, and the sun was far away. Saturn, of course, cast its own reflected glow, frosting the landscape. But it wasn’t like Earth. No one would ever mistake this place for Earth.

On most days, that suited Ayo just fine. She preferred a landscape that didn’t lull her into thinking it was made for humans, it was hospitable, it was safe. She wanted to see the landscape’s teeth.

Now, it was all teeth: the walls of rills and canyons towering up around her, gnashing at the sky. The ground shivered underneath her boots a few times, as though to remind her that the threat might not be over. The centipede remained obediently silent. Parker, frustratingly so.

For half an hour, now, she’d just felt the crunch of ice underfoot; heard that vibration translate up her suit as sound.

She hated it. But she tried to read the cold tension in her gut as safety, because she’d loved it on Earth. And that’d been the problem: She’d been in love with the blue skies and the gray storms, the green grass and the knife-white snow. Search and rescue on Earth felt, more often than not, like an adventure. Serious, of course, but with that tinge of wild romance the Terran natural world still inspired. On Enceladus, the work felt like a punishment. At best, a trudge. A chore.

This was the job: Someone was in extremis, and her role was to go out, into a potentially deadly situation, and maybe bring back a corpse. All the skill she could bring to the field, and some part was still a roll of the dice.

And just how loaded were the dice, today?

She’d just cleared a small ledge when her exosuit detected a tremor in the ground, her helmet detected a shiver in the fitful water-vapor atmosphere, and the systems combined to synthesize a meaningful sound: a rolling crash like a sudden waterfall.

A second later, the centipede reported a flat ((Error.))

Ayo spun. The centipede reared up, its body shielding her from a glittering avalanche of scree ice, and she went to her hands and knees and braced on instinct. Two seconds, three, and the avalanche slowed, though the centipede didn’t lower itself down again. From this angle, Ayo could see that two of its back legs had actually slid into a crack in the ice wall, which had compressed shut around them when loose ice came down. “Oh, come on!”

Easy enough to get out of: The rest of the centipede provided all the leverage it would need. Whether that would bring the whole wall down around them was the question.

She stood. Walked around centipede, testing each step as she took it, to inspect the other side. “Centipede, enable emotive feedback. How much do you know about glaciology?”

The centipede considered, tried (futilely, once again) to reach the main database at Carpenter, failed, and compiled a response. ((I’m sorry. Not much.)) Without Ayo there to shield, it lowered itself back to the ground.

“You can’t tell if deforming the ice here will cause a slide?” Ayo asked.

((No.))

The other side of the centipede was undamaged and unstuck. Ayo put her hands on the exoskeleton joints at her hips.

Inside the centipede would be safer. The centipede could unstick itself, and if there was another ice slide, the ice couldn’t crush her. She’d be safe—and cramped, and cut off from what tactile sense of the environment around her her suit and exoskeleton still allowed. Plus, she’d have to remove the exoskeleton and stow it just to fit inside.

She looked up. And up: The ice still glowed with Saturnlight, and the ribbon of the sky had narrowed to a thread. Her heart skipped.

As though sensing that—maybe in response to her biometrics—the centipede said, ((I’m afraid.))

Are you, centipede? Lies. It couldn’t feel anything—its systems weren’t that advanced. It could only say it could.

Ayo was the one who could feel fear. She was the one who could suffer fear. She was afraid enough for them both.

“Can we make it to Parker’s location?” she asked. Leave aside the question of whether or not he was alive down there. Just getting there was proving to be challenge enough.

A pause. A telling one, she was sure. Then, ((With difficulty,)) it admitted.

“We didn’t take this job to have it easy,” Ayo said. Then she shook her head. “I didn’t.”

The centipede hadn’t had a choice in the matter.

“Disable emotive feedback.” She swung wide, looking at the picture from another angle. “All right.” This was stupid, more than likely, but quick mental models gave Ayo enough confidence not to label it suicidal. She walked back in, tucking herself under the centipede’s forebelly. “Centipede, extract yourself—two meters lateral.”

((Brace,)) the centipede warned, flatly. Then its vast white body heaved.

The wall buckled, and another slide of ice shook itself down. Not, though, a catastrophic one: ten, eleven square meters, Ayo estimated, and the centipede shook its body to spill ice down to either side. With her body below it, the centipede’s first directive was to protect her: It didn’t let them become re-buried.

The scree settled. It gave a few trailing shivers, and her suit interpreted a long groan from some vibration beneath the surface, but soon enough, the muttering stopped. Ayo let out a brief laugh. Not that the situation was funny.

“How are we doing, centipede?”

((No access to Carpenter databanks. Independent calculations estimate successful traversal chance in the low twenty percentile))

One in five that they’d make it to Parker’s position. Ayo was hopeful enough, confident enough—no. Stubborn enough to try for it.

Or—no. Afraid enough. Not fear of death; she felt that, yes, but as an abstract. She didn’t want to fail. Again.

One in five was still one more than zero. Twenty in a hundred was twenty more than zero, and put that way, it almost seemed like a fighting chance.

“Well, let’s go.”

If the centipede thought she was an idiot, fortunately, it couldn’t say.

• • • •

The third shake could have killed her.

Would have, if the exoskeleton had poorer calibration, if she’d had poorer training. As it was, Ayo’s conscious brain was booted from control entirely, as her body reacted on instinct. One second, three, five—she lost track of time. Time returned only slowly, after the world righted itself again.

She was hanging from an exoskeleton-enhanced grip over a crevasse.

She didn’t look down to see how deep it was. Above her, the centipede was moving, seemingly erratically—trying to find a stable path to her. She flattened herself to the wall, felt for handholds and footholds, studied the flashing indicators rioting in her HUD. Managed, through effort and no small bit of luck, to get herself up over the lip just as the centipede scrambled to her.

Then she lay there, staring up at the centipede, gasping.

Am I alive?

The centipede didn’t answer her unvoiced query. But after a moment, unprompted, it said ((Geologic activity increase of thirty-seven percent over previous incident.))

“It’s getting worse.” Punctuating her words, a shelf of ice detached from somewhere to Ayo’s right, widening the crevasse. She rolled to her hands and knees and distanced herself from the ledge. Even the centipede sidled. “Parker?”

((No signal.))

Well, she hadn’t expected one. She swallowed, then swallowed again. A bitter taste climbed the back of her throat. “Chart a course.” She was shaking. She could grind that out with action, she was sure. Keep moving. Don’t look down. Don’t think. Just move. “What’s the best path to get us to Parker?”

((No paths are advised.))

Ayo’s face twisted. “Calculate it anyway!”

The centipede reared.

Ayo stumbled back, some vestigial part of her brain seeing the sudden motion and interpreting threat, looking for defense, looking for shelter. The centipede towered above her, alien for all its engineered relatability. Then, trembling, it let itself back to the ground.

That hadn’t been subtle, in the least. Ayo let out a breath, fanning her annoyance to cover her fear. “Centipede, disable—”

No. That wasn’t right. Emotive feedback was already disabled. Had been this entire way.

Ayo stared at the centipede’s sensors, so carefully styled to suggest eyes. There was a machine intelligence behind those, no animal intelligence. Nothing with feelings. Not really. Just a lot of software to ape them.

The knowledge didn’t stop Ayo from shivering, as though a thread of cold air slipped inside her suit.

As though a thread of cold air could. Her suit was pressurized to one Earth atmosphere—more atmosphere than Enceladus had. A leak in her suit would depressurize the whole thing, not let a cold draft in. It was psychosomatic. A sense memory, maybe: a creeping reminder of a previous failure. Unease slipping in to the tune of—what, a bug in the software? A failsafe she’d never known about? An aberration?

I don’t want to be here.

The thought hit her with more force than she expected.

I shouldn’t be here. Even the centipede, a machine specifically designed to support rescue efforts in dangerous situations, doesn’t want to be here. Look at it. It’s afraid.

She took a breath, and it turned into a hiccupping sob.

Swallow it. Ignore it. You’ve got a job to do out there.

Out, across the shattered landscape, across the uncertain glacier. Down there, across that once-traversable plain, Parker was either dead or alive. If alive, the medical care Ayo could provide for him might or might not keep him alive until they reached Carpenter. If they reached Carpenter. The journey out was only half the battle. It had been a journey she’d undertaken with hope, at the beginning—or, if not hope, a resolve to do all she could. To make a bid for the most favorable trade. One sizable risk on one known human life, winning one potential human life preserved.

What good was human hope against the calculated risk assessment of the centipede? At some point, that human cognitive distortion—that faith that death was something that happened to other people—worked to preserve populations, if not individuals. Ayo’s job was to walk out onto that murderous plain. But Ayo’s job was also to recognize that one downed surveyor and one downed rescuer was worse than one downed surveyor and one rescuer who knew when to leave well enough alone. At the end of the day, Carpenter would rather have one corpse than two; but they’d rather have zero than one, and what Ayo had to guide her was speculation, bravado, suspicion, and the cold logic of the centipede wrapped up in its emotive tones. She didn’t know anything.

Neither did the centipede, of course. But it trembled. Surely she hadn’t imagined that. It had trembled.

What’s the trade?

The words, when she found them, were already catching in her throat.

“Centipede,” she said. One potential life forfeit. One ascertained life preserved. And one—what? Piece of equipment. Virtual life. One centipede out of danger. She wouldn’t have turned back, for herself. “Chart the safest course to Carpenter. Maybe we can get ourselves home.”

©2018 by An Owomoyela. Originally published in Mechanical Animals, edited by Selena Chambers and Jason Heller. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

An (pronounce it “On”) Owomoyela is a neutrois author with a background in web development, linguistics, and weaving chain maille out of stainless steel fencing wire, whose fiction has appeared in a number of venues including Clarkesworld, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Lightspeed, and a handful of Year’s Bests. An’s interests range from pulsars and Cepheid variables to gender studies and nonstandard pronouns, with a plethora of stops in-between. Se can be found online at an.owomoyela.net.

The Memory Plague

D. Thomas Minton | 5667 words

In the beginning, we are one, and we are ignorance.

Our skin is chaffed tender from the womb-sac and the exit ring. Out, we writhe blindly in the grit that cuts our softness until the dryness of the air hardens us.

Slowly, receptors awaken.

Muted colors curve across the night, outlining the glistening ribs of the drop chamber arcing over us like planetary rings.

Instinctually, we grope through the hard stillness. Our tac-pads draw against lines of unmoving flesh, cold like a memory of interstellar vacuum. A dome of skin radiates faint warmth. Flesh peels away like the rind of a fruit, and a stone pops forth, slick with life fluid gone cold.

Comfort bleeds from it, easing our fear, but insufficiently to fill the void. We curl away from the shadows, afraid, sheltering the stone in our knobby appendages. There must be more, but in this darkness, alone, our primal yearning to feed is overwhelming, and the stone, smooth as starlight, slides effortlessly into us.

Its first sliver dissolves. From it, a memory seeps into our consciousness.

We are Audu.

We are the first.

• • • •

Air moves through the breach in the side of the drop chamber. Our simple receptors detect shadows of movement, but we taste only bitter bio-lubricants and inorganic metal oxides. The shadows sway too regularly to be living, to be feed, but we shield our vitals with our hardened back skin and withdraw our tac-pads. As the first of our vorta, we hold the ancestral fears rooted deeply to when the Vortive were primeval and planet-bound.

Another sliver of memory dissolves into our being.

We are the hundred and sixth vorta in our lineage, and the stone contains our collective memories. We do not remember the homeworld—out of necessity, the Vortive went to the stars before we were birthed from the collective consciousness—but we remember traversing the void with our brethren in a living matrix of organo-crystalline structure, vagrants of the stellar winds.

We are on a feeding ground, but we sense no other vorta, and the comforting hum of the collective consciousness is absent. Perhaps, in those confusing, initial moments of the culling, our drop chamber was launched into the wrong sector, as once happened to the eighth vorta in our lineage. But even then, the thought-sphere buzzed with excitement, with hunger destined to be sated.

But here, now, silence.

Yet, they must be out there. They would not leave us because we are of the one and the many.

• • • •

Omi is birthed from pain so intense it is a flash of white-hot light. Then, through the shadows and the muted shapes cut the hard-edged geometry of metal and glass, scattered across the floor like grains of stellar dust—alien debris come in through the jagged hole breached in the side of the drop chamber.

Coated in birthing fluid, Omi sits up on our segmented tarsi, thrusting eyestalks high. What is this place? Omi asks, always curious, as is Omi’s purpose.

The feeding ground, we say.

Omi accepts our answer, as Omi is meant to, but it draws attention to the hollowness eating within us. For a vorta, harvesting feed is our contribution to the Vortive. Without us, the collective consciousness will cease to exist.

On the wall opposite the breach in the drop chamber, the plates have separated, exposing a crevice filled with a tangle of fluid vessels and fleshy organs that feed the drop chamber’s womb-sac and connect Omi to us through the thought-sphere. The organs glow warmly under Omi’s long-wave scrutiny, but otherwise reveal nothing.

Bored, Omi click-clicks across the floor, our eyestalks sweeping and spinning, taking in the carbon scoring that blackens the plating along the jagged edge of the breach. Omi thrusts our body out into the yellow light. From the ground far below, alien pillars of stone and metal thrust upward, twisted and broken, their outer walls torn away, their tops sheared off, their insides gutted black from fire and rot.

Omi scuttles out the hole, the nano-bristles on our tarsi holding us fast to the vertical surface. Far beneath us, visible only due to Omi’s advanced photoreceptors, green stalks sway in the moving air. They sprout from deep cracks in the ground, between crushed metal and glass containers and blocks of fallen stone riddled with twisted metal bars, like bristles.

Omi, come back.

But Omi scuttles down the wall, intent on the movement below. We reach the ground, and Omi sniffs the fleshy green blades with our nasal-bulb.

Instinctively, we know they are not feed. In the universe, energy comes in many forms. These green blades lack the complexity of sentience. They offer nothing to sustain the collective consciousness.

Omi moves on, scuttling and stopping, our tarsi click-clicking on the hardened ground. Each time we stop, Omi thrusts our array of receptors upward to gather inputs. The ground reeks of long-chain hydrocarbons and oxidized metal. Small things scurry before us, twisting down into the cracks as we approach.

Without Omi, the drop chamber is muted again. We curl away, afraid, as shadows brush by us. They feel substantial in the solitude as if something tangible lurks within.

Come back, we say, our fear palpable.

Omi trains our eyestalks upward. Our drop chamber is embedded near the top of one of the alien towers. We detect nothing perched outside poised to attack, but that does not comfort us. We are not complete, so we are not yet equipped to hunt. Instead, we are vulnerable, and Omi should return.

Yet Omi’s curiosity drives us across the rubble field, our bulb scenting the ground, while our eyestalks search for heat signals. We slither through dark holes and twisted spaces under metal beams and around decaying debris. Each turn carries Omi farther from us and increases our discomfort.

Through the thought-sphere, Omi senses our rising fear and reluctantly breaks off our search.

Only when Omi draws close does our fear retreat.

Soon, we will be three, we say, as Omi scuttles back into drop chamber, and huddled together, we find comfort knowing that soon we will fulfill our purpose. Soon we will hunt.

• • • •

Another sliver dissolves, and we remember the taste of our first feeding ground like it is today and not generations past. The sentients, our feed, had yet to achieve interplanetary travel and offered futile resistance. Our drop chambers rained down on their crude settlements like embers from a fire, and the vorta burned across their world, consuming everything. No refuge spared them from their purpose, and when the grounds were filled with their empty husks, the Vortive departed, following our advanced scouts across the void to the next culling. We have fed on countless grounds, scattered across the glitter of the dark. These worlds, holding sentient life fresh and ripe for our arrival, are our birthright.

• • • •

Snarling, Rhu’s lithe form shakes off the birthing fluid and undulates across the grit, circling the chamber like angry smoke. Rhu snuffles the air currents.

Where are they? Rhu growls.

Omi scuttles to the jagged hole, Rhu in our wake, and together we lean out. Even with night nearing, the urge to feed is strong.

Rhu growls again, deep and raspy with menace. The scent of feed should be heavy on the air, but even Rhu’s sensitive tri-lobed bulb detects only decay, sweet and sharp.

Already Omi is out the hole and down the face of the tower, eyestalks sweeping for signs of movement. Rhu follows, the sticky pads of our feeding strings giving purchase on the pockmarked wall.

We alight on the ground, spreading out. Rhu slips through webs of metal netting, squirts between chunks of concrete. Our nasal bulb close to the ground now, we catch scent, familiar but faint, that sends shivers through us. Excited, Omi scuttles over the top of the debris, seeking a better vantage from which to triangulate.

Rhu delves down through the rubble, slithering through the tight spaces to the bottom, where we clatter into a pile of bleached sticks. Rhu holds one close, its scent stirring memories. Our feeding strings encase the bone, but these husks are now devoid of sustenance.

We howl with rage, and the bone splinters in Rhu’s grasp.

Omi’s eyestalks droop.

Our hunger and disappointment threaten to consume us. Yet, before that can happen, a new memory dissolves from the stone.

We came from the dark side of their moon, from an angle undetectable by their primitive sensors. By the time the Vortive dropped into orbit and disgorged the drop chambers, it was too late. We covered their planet, their cities, their forests, their oceans, like cinders from a pyre.

They were creatures of carbon and oxygen and hydrogen—the stuff of stars. We recall then the taste of their energy, each rich and complex, each different, each shaped not by a collective consciousness, but by individual ripening, individual experiences, creating memories unique and sweet as our memories of the fruits of our homeworld.

Rhu purrs.

Omi shudders with pleasure, our tarsi click-clicking on the rusted metal in the planet’s dying light.

This memory, while pleasurable, fails to comfort.

We shuffle around the small drop chamber. Pushed up against the wall is the lump of tissue that was our progenitor, now partially recycled by the chamber’s regenerators. The body is cold and lifeless, the flesh peeled open where our stone once burned. We have no memories of this vorta, but as the holder of our lineage’s collective memories, they were a first, like us.

They, too, were Audu.

Our tac-pads slide across the dome of skin on our torso. The stone, hard and smooth, pulses warmly beneath the thin tissue.

“You are not the first.”

The simple truth had been within us all along, but we do not possess the deductive abilities to reduce the evidence to such a simple statement of fact. Yet phrased succinctly, it is evident; we are not the first vorta of our lineage to be birthed on this feeding ground.

Then, quickly, we realize that statement arrived not from the collective memories of our lineage, but through our tac-pads.

We lift our attention from the body of our progenitor. Except for the motes spinning in the dying light streaming in through the breach, the drop chamber is still and warm. Again we feel soft vibrations in the air, and we shift our tac-pads to gather the sensations.

“Ring-a-ring o’ roses . . .”

We rotate our tac-pads, trying to triangulate the direction of the sound, but the source eludes us. It moves behind the walls, first next to us, then across from us, then back at our side.

“. . . A pocket full of posies . . .”

How does it move so quickly and effortlessly when the space behind the metal plates, packed tightly with organs, is accessible only to the chamber’s regenerators?

“. . . Hush-hush, hush-hush . . .” The sound continues, growing quieter as if imploring us to silence.

Who are there? we ask.

Omi rises up on our rear tarsi. Where? Our eyestalks scan across the rubble field. Nearby, Rhu slithers from a hole, our sleek body bristled with feeding strings, all waving excitedly.

Where are you? we ask. Our fear rises quick and hard, radiating danger signals into the thought-sphere. Instantly, Omi drops onto all tarsi, and scuttles over the slabs of crumbling stone toward the alien tower in which our drop chamber is embedded. Rhu follows, driven by the urgency of our fear.

“. . . Or we all tumble down.”

We retreat first one way, then the other. Whenever we move away from the sound, the vibrations shift so that we are moving toward them again. We consider fleeing out the breach, but our stocky form is slow and clumsy. We would never make it down the vertical surface of the alien tower. But our skin is thick and tough, and we can curl up so that our vitals and our receptors are safely tucked away. In that way, surely, we would survive long enough for Omi and Rhu to return.

We see something then. In the crevice where the metal wall plates have separated, barely visible among the tangle of vessels and organs, glistening white orbs darken for a half second as membranes slide over them and retract. They are set in indentations on a soft globe of lumpy flesh, which, as it seems to move forward, coalesces into what we instinctively know is a face.

We tremble at the memory of its taste.

Feed.

Omi rushes forward, our tarsi click-clicking as we scale the vertical surface toward the drop chamber. Rhu is ahead, nearing the breach.

Vibrations emanate from the hinged orifice along the bottom of the face and dance across the air to our tac-pads. The sound resonates through our consciousness, forming images that, beyond reason, carry meaning: “Not feed. Human.”

The membranes slide over the white orbs, and the globe of flesh withdraws deeper into the crevice, fading away like dissipating smoke.

Rhu bursts through the opening, feeding strings whipping with enough vigor to emit a low frequency hum. We dart across the room and plunge into the crevice, squeezing in among the tightly packed vessels and soft organs, but our nasal bulb detects only bio-lubricants and us.

Rhu trembles with pent up aggression. Where are they? It is an affront to our superiority that this feed eludes us. Rhu turns to delve deeper inside, but our actions are injuring the delicate bio-machinery of our drop chamber. Gently, we urge Rhu to come out.

We must feed, Rhu says, refusing to listen. Rhu knows only the hunt, cares only to feed, and our primal hunger drives us deeper into the cavity. The microbarbs on the tips of our feeding strings lacerate the chamber’s organs. Fluid oozes out, puddling on the floor. The chamber’s regenerators buzz to life behind the walls and move to stem the damage.

We call to Rhu a second time with no effect.

Omi arrives and searches the chamber for other cracks in the wall plating through which to peer. Finding none, Omi scuttles outside and searches the exterior of the drop chamber for other entries. Omi slips through a space between the external heat skin and the alien tower and drops into a shadowy interior. Wires and cables dangle from the ceiling tiles. Where our chamber has not destroyed the internal structures, the space is sectioned into a grid of cells by mold-covered walls that are only slightly taller than us. Omi click-clicks along an exposed metal beam, our eyestalks sweeping back forth.

Finally, Rhu stops our thrashing and collapses, flaccid, among the oozing organs. The damage is significant, but fortunately, repairable.

Where are they? Rhu asks, despondent.

We saw them? Skepticism colors Omi’s tone.

Certain, we say.

Then where are they? Rhu demands.

We have no answer.

Omi breaks off the search and scuttles into one of the grid cells. On a table-like platform, covered in a skin of dust and residue, is a thin rectangle of metal and electronics and a discolored board with punch-keys. A wooden frame, face up on the platform, encases a two-dimensional image behind a dusty pane of transparent silicate.

Our eyestalks swivel closer.

What are these? Omi asks, in reference to the four fleshy globes that comprise the image.

Human, we say without hesitation.

Hoomon? Omi savors the name like the sweet essence of feed. Omi likes the sound of something different, and it piques our curiosity. We scuttle into the adjacent cell and find another image tacked onto the soft, moldy wall. The paper is curled and blackened, but the image is another pair of faces.

What are these? Omi asks.

Human, we say again.

They are first? Omi asks.

They have no second, we say.

How can they all be hoomon, then? They are all the same but different. Not like the vorta.

They are feed, Rhu says. Nothing more.

All lifeforms are less than the Vortive. We are the pinnacle of sentient design, our superiority ensured by the unified knowledge of our existence shared through the collective consciousness.

Hoomon . . . how do we know this construct? Omi asks.

We are afraid to explain to Omi and Rhu because we do not understand how we could communicate with feed. How did they access our thought-sphere and understand us? These are questions we are not yet capable of addressing.

Fortunately, Omi’s attention shifts, and we scuttle down the aisle between the cells, poking our eyestalks into cubicle after empty cubicle.

Rhu angrily stalks the drop chamber. Not even a scent.

They were there, we assure. As real as Rhu or Omi, the human was there. They had nowhere to flee, yet they are gone like a wisp of ozone. Not ozone, for even that leaves a trace.

Another memory bleeds from the stone. A memory of this feeding ground, rich and sweet under its unremarkable yellow star. Humans everywhere, but after the shock of the initial culling, they realized they could not resist us, and they fled into the tunnels and dark spaces under the rubble of their primitive civilization. Our progenitor hunted those narrow dark spaces, passing through conduits where our feeding strings were compressed by the tightness of the walls. In dark corners, behind barricades of metal, quietly trembling in the sputtering light of flaming sticks, we found them. These humans were crafty, good at hiding, but for all their wile, they could not escape us. We found them in pairs and triplets, small and large, each one different and succulent, each one strong and determined to escape, but failing. Human faces flash by, each in their final moments as our feeding strings pulled their energy from their organic vessels. Their eyes grew wide as they embraced their fate, and the shadow of their fleeing existence descended over those gleaming orbs.

In one of these faces, we recognize the landscape of their features. We must be mistaken, confused by the superficial resemblances among the individuals, but as we study the face, our certainty rises. Rhu had found this human in the tunnels long after we had first landed. Unlike their brethren, this one and their companion had survived for many days. Curiously, they had not tried to escape while Rhu drained their companion, and like all the other feed, ceased to exist, the gleam slowly, inexorably draining from their eyes as they were culled. We know this because it is in the collective memory of our lineage. Yet, with certainty now, we are sure the face in this memory is the same that confronted us today.

• • • •

Night on this feeding ground is darker than the vacuum of space. Its atmosphere dampens our vision in many wavelengths, and the background glow of the universe, beautiful and bright, is muted.

Driven by hunger, Rhu slithers through dark spaces, nasal bulb snuffling, but detecting only the reek of dust and decayed metal, and the faint, persistent odor of ancient bones. It is as if these grounds are empty.

Elsewhere, Omi clicks across stone floors stained sticky with organic residue. Human faces hang on the walls, and Omi stops to study each of them in turn, cooing, hoomon softly, absent-mindedly.

We shuffle our stubby torso over to the breach in our drop chamber and turn our gaze up to the quiet, star-filled night. What has happened to the Vortive that this world is so quiet. Our collective memory tells us the feed were culled efficiently, yet they still exist, whereas the Vortive seems to not.

Our torso vibrates to comfort us, but our fears do not subside. Only the hum of the collective consciousness will bring us peace, but instead of the collective consciousness, we hear again the human sounds, “Ring-a-ring o’ roses, a pocket full of posies, hush-hush hush-hush, or we all tumble down.” A strange feeling that is more than the hollowness of our hunger turns uncomfortably within us.

Fearing the human may have returned, we turn our insufficient receptors to the crevice, but in the darkness, they are not up to the task. We wish Omi and Rhu were here to show us nothing lurks within, but we are afraid to call to them through the thought-sphere.

“Why did you kill her?”

In the shadows to our left, the human stands over a fallen companion. The scene matches our memory of their culling, and scanning to our right, we sense Rhu, as in that memory, circling in towards the small human. Yet unlike our memory, Rhu slows as we grow closer to the human, until finally, Rhu’s sleek form becomes still and shadowy.

Is this a collective memory? We know Rhu has not returned to the drop chamber; we sense Rhu below us, among the ruins. Yet, we also know this human no longer exists, except in the collective memory of our lineage.

“Why did you kill her?” the human asks again.

We do not understand our compulsion to respond, nor care that we lack the mechanisms necessary to produce the human’s sound. They are feed, we say.

Omi pauses from our inspection of the human images. Audu?

I realize then that Omi and Rhu do not share this experience; this human is for Audu alone. As the first, we are the keeper of the collective memories of our lineage, to share them, to augment them, and when our vorta’s time is complete, to pass them on to the collective consciousness.

Slender appendages hide the human’s face, and their body shudders. Human communication is crude and primitive, limited to a narrow bandwidth of sound, imperfect visual cues, and reeking chemical emissions that lack subtlety, but we do not understand this reaction.

What is this? we ask.

The human looks up, their eyes glistening in the moonlight. “I’m sad because she is dead, and everything she was is now gone forever.”

We do not understand. At the end of every culling, the organic form of the vorta are re-absorbed by their drop chamber, and we cease to exist in this form. The energy we extracted during the culling is uploaded to the Vortive, and the collective memories of our lineage are processed into the collective consciousness. Vorta are destined to exist, not exist, and exist again, but there is never loss.

The click-click of Omi’s tarsi coming in through the hole draws our attention. Rhu follows, feeding stalks waving rapidly in agitation, but Rhu does not charge into the corner and attack the human. When we turn back, the human and their companion are gone. So too is the unmoving Rhu, and we are left shaken, afraid, and unable to understand what is happening to us.

Audu? Omi asks again, and we choose to remain silent.

• • • •

Ba’s bulbous and wrinkled body lies motionless on the metal plating beneath the womb-sac, and for a moment we fear stillborn. Then stumpy appendages sprout from our dorsum and the turgid, fleshy mass rises. Instinctively, Ba tries to wriggle into a narrow recess in the machinery beneath the dripping womb-sac, but the machinery has been damaged, and we no longer fit.

Ba emits a quivering noise that grates across our tac-pads, causing consternation. Ba needs to be sheltered to function, to attain our purpose as the fourth. Turning, Ba searches for another place and notices the crevice between the damaged wall plates.

We do not want Ba to go in there, but Ba’s despondence is nearly crippling, and we do not block them. The human, if they ever existed, is gone now, and the crevice is safe. Once pressed in among the chamber’s vessels and organs, Ba coos serenely, drawing the tension from us like a toxin.

After a time, Ba says, The thought-sphere is quiet.

Memories flash as Ba extracts them from us for processing. They reach back to the feeding ground where the first vorta in our lineage tasted the succulent sweetness of a successful culling. Then the second feeding ground, equally ripe, the third where the resistance was strong but ultimately futile, the fourth, fifth, sixth—each memory speeding past our consciousness faster than those before it. The memories stop abruptly on this world, with the human face that has haunted us.

Sensing Ba’s activity, Rhu and Omi halt, raise their nasal bulbs and eyestalks into the air.

Awash in the memories of feed, we purr and shake with pleasure. When the memories finally end, the hollowness of our hunger is greater. Left unsatiated, our flesh will soon begin to die once the last of the memories have dissolved from the stone left by our progenitor.

We are eager to resume the culling, but we await Ba’s wisdom.

Finally, Ba speaks. The feed are depleted. The Vortive have departed. Our purpose is ended.

Rhu’s feeding strings weave agitated patterns through the air. This ground is not empty. Audu sensed one, but it escaped. We hear the disgust in Rhu’s tone. Tell us how to find it, Rhu says gruffly.

The thought-sphere is quiet; therefore, the Vortive have migrated, Ba says, carefully articulating our logical argument. The Vortive migrate only once the feed are gone. Therefore, the feed are depleted.

The Vortive does not abandon vorta, we say.

Ba rustles dismissively. This assumption is unsupported by the collective memory. When vorta are defective, they are excised to ensure the integrity of the Vortive. The collective memories contain four instances of vorta abandoned on feeding grounds.

How can vorta be a threat to the collective consciousness if they are part of that consciousness?

Ba emits displeasure at our temerity. They are a threat if they introduce memories inconsistent with the identity of the Vortive, Ba says. The one and the many are the same.

Ba’s statement disturbs us. We should not challenge Ba’s analytical capabilities—it is not the place of the first to do such—but Ba must be wrong. We possess no defects in ourselves or our progenitors, and we pose no threat to the collective consciousness. The one and the many are the same, so we do not understand why we have been left.

When we do not respond, Ba turns inward to ruminate, leaving us alone in our drop chamber.

Our tac-pads detect faint vibrations. “If the one and the many are the same, are they not just the one?”

Eyes materialize from the darkness near the breach. They are followed by the faint outline of the human’s face and the grey silhouette of their spindly, frail body.

Collectively, we are more. We are the Vortive.

The one and the many, Omi says, far below us.

Again, the vibrations are faint, as if the human noise is intended to be soft. “That doesn’t make sense,” they say.

What is this creature that seems to both exist and be a memory?

“I am Tru,” they say. “I was named after my grandmother, Gertrude, because my mom says my dad lacked imagination.”

The communication between us is not clear, but we discern that Tru is a name designating this entity of feed, like Audu-Omi-Rhu-Ba designates our specific vorta within the collective consciousness of the Vortive.

Yet, this was not what we wanted to know.

As if they can penetrate our mind, the human responds again, “All that I am will be gone forever. You fed on me.” The face fades back into the darkness, and the eyes wink out of existence, like light into a blackhole.

Our crude receptors sense only metal and air and darkness.

Afraid, now, we curl about ourselves protectively. We have no memory of feed possessing the ability to come and go like smoke. If Tru is only a figment of our mind drawn from a collective memory, then the feeding ground is empty, as Ba deduced. It is another realization that scares us more. Collective memories are not capable of interacting with the existing. Yet this memory seems to be not of the collective memory, but an intrusion of the human’s energy, an infection capable of appearing at will and communicating with Audu, an independent sentient entity capable of challenging the core tenants of our collective consciousness. To which we are drawn to one conclusion.

Ba is correct; we are defective.

• • • •

We are not capable of fully processing this information and it cripples us into inactivity.

Ba, however, wriggles from the crevice and stands next to our curled torso. Ba’s cooing, along with the sense that Ba knows what needs to be done, provides comfort.

We must cease to exist, Ba says, after a time.

Sensing something has gone wrong, Omi and Rhu pause their hunt. Rhu howls in denial and turns back to chasing spectres. We try to comfort Omi by vibrating.

Ba shuffles over to the machinery under the womb-sac and pushes up against the interface plate. Ba intends to disable the chamber’s regenerators, shutting down the womb-sac so no new vorta will be birthed, and our collective memories will dissipate into the ether. Our lineage will cease to exist.

We are numb to Ba’s effort because the enormity of . . . death is beyond our experience. Feed die; vorta do not.

“No one wants to die.” Tru watches us from where they squat against the wall next to the breach that opens out onto the star-filled sky.

You do not exist, we say, willing the human to leave us, but they do not disappear.

Ba pauses, emitting scents of confusion. Ba cannot detect the human because it resides within us, among, but not of, our collective memories.

Our loathing transforms into anger. All that we are will end forever, and our primal instincts, which reach back to our time planet-bound and primitive, struggle to accept this.

Tru’s head shakes from side-to-side, and the act seems to diffuse our emotion. “You don’t have to die, you chose to.”

The one and the many are no longer the same. The words sound hollow as we watch the human before us. We have never considered the sentient design of feed—they are inferior to the Vortive and irrelevant—but all humans are the same and also different, each its own lineage with only one generation. Yet, looking at the gentle curves of Tru’s starlit face, we find it hard to accept that this difference makes them truly inferior.

“Different is just different,” Tru says.

Alone, we contemplate this concept.

Ba circles the drop chamber, sweeping the space with our crude receptors. Finding nothing, Ba stops near the breach, next to the squatting, yet unseen, human.

What is wrong, Audu? Ba asks.

Why must the one and the many be the same?

Ba is silent, our confusion obvious. Ba’s logic is bound by the evidence of the collective memories, and we realize Ba is incapable of reaching any other conclusion. As the first, our primordial instincts do not bind us to such limitations.

We are defective, Ba says. We must cease to exist.

We do not want to die. As we tell this to Ba, Tru echoes our words within our consciousness, and we understand then, that if we die, then all human lineages will die with us. The Vortive has always culled feed to extinction. We have always known it to be our birthright, yet we have never questioned this assumption.

The stone dissolves a final time, and the last of our lineage’s collective memories flood our consciousness. We have been trapped on this world for fifty-seven generations, repeating this cycle of existing and not existing, passing on the memories of our lineage as we were made to do. Every generation of our vorta has struggled to understand what has happened, and every generation has ultimately reached the same conclusion: the one and the many being different has a beauty to its design, and we are arrogant to believe the Vortive is superior to all other sentients.

This is wrong, we say.

This is the only way, Ba says.

When Ba moves back toward the womb-sac, we shuffle forward to block them. Ba tries to evade us, but we bump them back. Ba does not stop, however, so we bump them again, this time harder, and Ba, being awkward in physical form, tumbles backward and out of the breach.

Ba’s terror—our terror—is sharp and painful as the ground rushes upward. The force of the impact knocks us over, and for a moment, we believe we have ceased to exist, but our receptors slowly recover from the shock, and we lay prone on the floor of our drop chamber, alone and no longer four.

We had not intended for this to happen, but we also know that this generation will not be the last. Ba has ceased to exist, but Ba is not dead.

Above us, the womb-sac clicks to life. The regenerators hum behind the walls.

The drop chamber is empty, although, with satisfaction, I sense Tru is still with us.

The stone, now empty, can no longer sustain. Omi settles down before one of the images of the humans, our tarsi now silent, our eyestalks settling into the sticky organic residue that coats the floor of our tomb. Rhu’s lithe form slows and comes to a final rest in the tunnels deep beneath the rubble, in among the spaces where the humans of this dead world once tried to evade their extinction. We were an agent of that destruction, but we now have a chance to redeem our arrogance. Humans are not yet extinct, and they survive now as long as we survive.

We grow tired and can no longer right our torso. We sense our organic energy dissipating. The stone burns now, recording our final moments for the next generation, appending it to the legacy of our lineage’s collective memories.

The end and the beginning are the same but not the same.

In the end, we are one, and we are regret.

©2021 by D. Thomas Minton.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

D. Thomas Minton has recently migrated into the mountains of British Columbia, but still pines for the tropical waters of the Pacific Ocean. Fortunately, when not writing, he still gets to travel to remote (and warm) places, where he helps communities conserve coral reefs. His short fiction has been published in Asimov’s, Lightspeed, and Daily Science Fiction, and his books can be found in most online bookstores. His idle ramblings hold court at dthomasminton.com.

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

On the Fringes of the Fractal

Greg van Eekhout | 4217 words

I was working the squirt station on the breakfast shift at Peevs Burgers when I learned that my best friend’s life was over.

The squirt guns were connected by hoses to tanks, each tank containing a different slew formula. Orders appeared in lime-green letters on my screen, and I squirted accordingly. Two Sausage Peev Sandwiches took two squirts from the sausage slew gun. An order of Waffle Peev Sticks was three small dabs of waffle slew. The slew warmed and hardened on the congealer table, and because I’d paid attention during the twenty-minute training course and applied myself, I knew just when the slew was ready. I was a slew expert.

Sherman was the other squirter on duty that morning. The orders were coming in fast and he was already wheezing on account of his exercise-induced asthma. His raspy breaths interfered with my ability to concentrate. You really have to concentrate because after four hours of standing and squirting there’s the danger of letting your mind wander, and once you do that you can lose control of the squirts and end up spraying food slew all over the kitchen like a fire hose.

“Wasted slew reflects badly on you,” said one of the inspirational posters in the employee restroom.

“What’s eating you, Sherman?” I asked, squirting eggs.

He squirted out twelve strips of bacon. “Nothing. Don’t worry about it. Not your problem.”

I’d known Sherman for a long time. We’d grown up as next-door neighbors, had gone to the same schools, had the same teachers. This year we were both taking Twenty-Five Places That Will Blow Your Mind (geography) and Six Equations You Won’t Believe (precollege math) and You’ll Have Itchy Eyes After Reading These Heartbreaking Stories (AP English). We did everything together, and even though he was a little higher stat than I was, he never made me feel weird about it.

“C’mon, Sherman. Don’t just stand there squirting in silent pain. Tell your pal Deni what’s wrong.”

He wheezed a while longer, really laboring. Then, like a miserable little volcano, he let it out: “My family lost stat yesterday.”

The cold hand of dread fondled my knee. “How much stat?”

“All of it. Every last little bit. We got zeroed out.”

Startled, I impulse squirted and missed the congealer entirely. Biscuit slew landed on the floor.

“My mom lost her job,” he explained. “And my dad gained nine pounds. My sister got more zits. The swimming pool water was yellow when the Stat Commission came to audit. It was a bunch of stuff. Just a perfect storm of bad stat presentation.” He rubbed his forearm across his nose. “I might as well be dead.”

I could only agree with him.

Stat was determined by a complicated algorithm that factored in wealth, race, genealogy, fat-to-muscle ratio, dentition, and dozens of other variables from femur length to facial symmetry to skull contours. It was determined by the attractiveness of one’s house. The suitability of one’s car. You could lose stat from a bad haircut. You could lose it by showing up to school with food slew on your blouse. I had done that once during freshman year and never gained it back.

Stat was the cornerstone of our great meritocracy.

In olden days, one of the worst punishments society could exact upon you was outlawing. It meant you were literally outside the law. You had no privileges, no protections, no rights. Anyone could just up and kill you without consequence. Being declared no-stat was a lot like that. Without stat, Sherman’s family would lose everything. Their house. The right to wear current fashions. To see the latest movies. To vote. And I could lose stat of my own just by being friends with a no-stat person.

My heart felt like a clammy potato. What was happening to my friend was worse than death. It was erasure.

I scraped congealed slew off the congealer, dumped it into various containers, and sent it down the slew chute to the drive-thru window.

“I just don’t know what to do,” Sherman said, squirting and wheezing.

I felt something surging within me like high-pressure burger slew through a lunch rush gun. This was a new feeling. A powerful feeling. The feeling that I could do something to break the patterns of my life and take Sherman along with me. The feeling that I could make a difference.

I was such an idiot.

“I’ll tell you what we’re going to do,” I declared. Sherman looked up from his station. Doubt and hope warred on his face. “We’re going to save your life.”

• • • •

The next morning, the alarm nagged me awake before dawn. It was early enough to hear the drones arrive, their rotors hurling morning birds from their paths. Delivery portals in the rooftops opened like flower petals and the drones dropped statpacks from their bomb bays. All over the division, people rushed to see what they’d been supplied with. I was usually in no hurry, but I needed to get an early start, so I gathered my share of my family’s package and brought it to my room.

My stat was pretty low, so as usual it was knockoff-brand shoes, last month’s cutoff jeans, and a shirt the exact same brown as my skin. I could already hear the kids in the school halls calling me Miss Monochrome. There were keys for the day’s new music releases from Top Three Radio, and some movies I didn’t really want to see and nobody else did either.

But I was lucky. It could have been worse. This morning, for the first time since he was born, Sherman would get nothing.

I said goodbye to my family: my mom and dad and sister, just noises and voices behind closed bathroom doors. Showers. Hair dryers. Giggles and high jinks from Morning Hard News. I wondered if I’d ever hear them again. Swallowing the lump in my throat, I went next door to collect Sherman.

He was something of a demoralized wreck. My clothes were low-stat fashion, but he was literally wearing the same thing he wore yesterday. His hair was literally the same old parrot yellow. Yesterday’s color. The sight of him only steeled my resolve. I could not let him live like this.

We loaded ourselves into my scuffed-up three-wheel grandma car and set out down the long, curving roads of our division.

We passed Cedar Grove Lane and Cedar Grove Court and Cedar Grove Place and Cedar Grove Way and made our way out to Cedar Grove Avenue.

We drove by Peevs Drugs, and Peevs Market, and Peevs Quik Oil and Tune-up, and Peevs 24-Hour Whatevers, and I didn’t even slow down at Peevs Burgers.

“Don’t you have breakfast shift in an hour?” Sherman said.

Sherman no longer worked at Peevs. They’d scrapped him when he lost his stat.

“I called in sick. This is more important.”

I grinned, thinking Sherman would thank me, but he only looked at me with something between wonder and disgust.

“You have no idea what you’re doing, do you?”

I continued past the little circle of bricks and the water feature and the grass you weren’t allowed to picnic on that marked the border of our division. “Taking a hit for a friend is never a mistake.” That was a line from Bomm and Gunn, the first movie Sherman and I ever saw together at the Peevs Cinnecle. Bomm says it to Gunn, and then they both get shot to death by a gang of mutant cool kids. They go down with their middle fingers raised. Slow motion and everything.

It’s pretty romantic.

Sherman just sighed from the passenger seat. “You’re a pal,” he said. Which were Gunn’s last words, spoken through a dazzling arterial mist.

What I remember more than the movie was the popcorn. I couldn’t afford any and Sherman could, so Sherman sprang for a big tub and shared it with me. That’s the kind of thing that makes friends for life.

Sherman inserted my stereo key into the stereo and futilely searched the Top Three stations for anything other than the top three hits. “So what’s the plan?”

“We’re going to go see Miss Spotty Pants.”

“Your . . . dog?”

“Miss Spotty Pants will know how to help us,” I said, ignoring Sherman’s tone of disbelief. There is little room for disbelief on a quest, I feel.

Sherman shook his head and made wheezy sounds of exasperation. “Then this isn’t really about me and my stat. This is about you and your dog.”

“It’s about both of us, okay?”

Sherman stayed quiet a long time, thinking it over. “Okay, Deni,” he said at last. “Okay. I fully support you in your misguided effort to redress injustices perpetrated against us.”

I glanced at him. “Really?”

He shrugged. “Sure, why not? I’m no-stat. What have I got to lose?”

And so, after going past another Peevs Drugs and Peevs 24-Hour Whatevers, we arrived at Miss Spotty Pants’s house.

She lived in a very nice house. There were eight bushes in the front yard, whereas my house had only four. Pillars supported a little roof thing over the door, which I suppose protected people from rain and birds. The fake stones in the lower outside walls were more three-dimensional than my house’s fake stones.

The doorbell played some Bach or Beethoven or Boston or one of those other classical guys whose name starts with a B, and Miss Spotty Pants’s new owner opened the door.

“Oh,” said Mrs. Godfrey, with an uncomfortable smile. “It’s you kids.”

The Godfreys used to live across the street from me and Sherman, but their stat had gone up high enough after work promotions that they were able to upgrade to a better division. Mrs. Godfrey looked quite different than I remembered. Her hair was bouncier and her teeth more symmetrical. But what really struck me were her pants. They changed length right before our eyes, rising above the ankles, charging halfway up her calves, then plunging back down and flaring out like trombone bells.

“Hey, Mrs. Godfrey,” Sherman said. “What’s going on?”

“Well, actually, this is a busy time—” she said, eager to get rid of us.

“No, I mean your pants. What’s going on with your pants?”

She stood a little taller, a little prouder. “They’re smart pants. They interface with the fashion channels and adjust themselves moment to moment as tastes evolve.”

Tastes were evolving really fast.

“I was hoping we could see Miss Spotty Pants,” I said.

“Oh, I . . . Well, as I said, this is a very busy time—”

“Is that Deni?” came a familiar voice from inside the house. There was a scrabbling and a galloping and then there she was, my old Dalmatian. She leaped through the doorway and almost knocked me off my feet. Standing on her hind legs with her paws on my chest, her butt wiggled so fast I thought her tail would fly right off and break a window. I scratched her behind her ears, which did nothing to kill her enthusiasm. I had to wipe my watering eyes.

When the Godfreys moved, they put in an application to take Miss Spotty Pants with them, even though she’d been my dog since she was a puppy. She was a shelter dog, and you never know what you’re getting with a shelter dog. But once her mods kicked in at about seven months old and she started talking and her extra spots came in, the Godfreys decided she was a really cool dog. And since the Godfreys had higher stat, they got their way.

Mrs. Godfrey didn’t want to let us in, but when Miss Spotty Pants bared her teeth, she relented. Mrs. Godfrey even got Sherman and me a couple of Peevs Colas and left us alone in the living room with Miss Spotty Pants. The inside of the Godfreys’ house wasn’t all that different from the inside of my house, only better in every way. We sat on their better couch and drank their Peevs from their better refrigerator. After some more obligatory petting and scritching, Miss Spotty Pants curled up at my feet and asked me what had brought me and Sherman. We told her about how Sherman’s family had been declared no-stat, and that we hoped she could help us.

She’d spent the first few months of her life in the pound, and she’d heard things from the other strays and rejects. Some of them came from far away, redolent with exotic, faraway scents, with odd dialects and strange ideas, and tales from distant lands. And when she came to our house, getting me up every two hours to pee, she spoke to me about what she’d learned in the concrete kennels.

She told me of lights and wonders. There was a city, she told me. And I asked her what a city was, and she wasn’t sure. All she knew was that it was different than the divisions. She told me of towers that scraped the skies, and grand parks and boulevards teeming with people, a place of variety and a million smells and a million sounds and of things one could barely imagine.

“Miss Spotty Pants,” I said, “how’d you like to go for a ride?”

She glanced around the Godfreys’ living room, with its better TV and better sofa and better cola. And before I could ask again, she was out the door and in my car, panting with irrepressible glee.

• • • •

Things got weird once we left our familiar divisions behind. So weird that at one point Sherman shouted for me to stop and pull over, and the three of us got out and stood on the sidewalk.

“Did you know this was here?” I asked Miss Spotty Pants.

“I never even imagined,” she said, her voice a gruff whisper.

There, at the intersection of Spring Brook Falls Avenue and Brook Falls Spring Avenue, were a burger place, a drugstore, a supermarket, and a convenience store.

Not a single one of them was a Peevs.

They were all something called a Wiggins.

Wiggins Burgers.

Wiggins Drugs.

Wiggins 24-Hour Whatevers.

We stared in wonder for what seemed like hours.

“No matter what happens from this point on,” I said, “I will never forget this moment.”

We went inside the 24-Hour Whatevers to buy fruit film snacks.

They were the same fruit film snacks you could get at Peevs.

• • • •

We drove for days, taking turns sleeping in the back seat and subsisting on the fruit film. I wondered if my family missed my voice through their bathroom doors. After so many days on the road, my brain began to change and time lost meaning. When we got out to pee at gas stations, my feet felt disconnected from the ground. The car’s odometer said we had driven hundreds of miles, yet, paradoxically, the farther we drove, the less distance we seemed to cover. Sherman and Miss Spotty Pants said they felt the same way.

“It’s the fractal,” said Sherman from the passenger seat. He stared ahead with red-rimmed eyes as if he was looking at something horrible and he couldn’t look away, like maybe a ghost or a dead brown lawn.

I remembered something about fractals. We’d covered them in Twelve Amazing Mathematical Concepts Everyone Should Know Before Eleventh Grade. A fractal is a pattern that repeats itself. Magnify it, and you’ll see the same pattern as if you’d reduced it.

Yes, we were in a fractal. The little streets curving out from bigger streets like the bent legs of a millipede. The regularity and spacing of the houses, the stores, the divisions. It had become like a fever dream where you keep repeating the same bit of the dream until you feel your brain contract, squeezing your thoughts down into a hot little cage.

“We are stains,” Sherman said. “And we are glorious.” He had a weird glow in his eye, like the time he drank green milkshake slew from the back of the walk-in freezer seven months after St. Patrick’s Day.

Miss Spotty Pants stretched her jaws in a great big yawn. “What are you talking about?”

“We are stains. And stains are glorious, because a stain is a variation in the fractal. A stain doesn’t repeat itself endlessly. A stain is unique.” He was gaining boldness as he spoke, becoming more alive. “Being a stain shouldn’t be a cause for humiliation and stat reduction. It should be celebrated.”

Sherman was saying dangerous, subversive stuff. The kind of stuff that could cost you stat. But like he’d said, he had nothing more to lose.

It was exciting and made me want to speed through the streets and do doughnuts in the cul-de-sacs.

• • • •

We kept on until Miss Spotty Pants spied a dim glow on the horizon, and I aimed the car toward it. As the hours and days piled on, the light grew brighter.

“It’s the city,” she said. “It must be.”

It turned out that she was right. Only the city turned out not to be what we’d hoped.

It was Sherman’s turn behind the wheel, and he’d fallen asleep and bumped into a fire hydrant at three miles an hour, waking me and my dog. We all got out of the car. Miss Spotty Pants peed on the hydrant while Sherman and I stared up at towers stained by rain and wind rising from fields of concrete like accusatory fingers, their windows covered with moss and lichen. The buildings were constructed from a dizzying array of materials. Glass and concrete and brick and marble. Back home, all was stucco. Stucco was the only element in the periodic table.

Weeds grew thick in the fissured, unnavigable streets, and we had no choice but to leave the car behind. We picked our way along the jumbled sidewalks, our voices hushed in fear and reverence. Miss Spotty Pants’s ears pricked at the scrabbling and scratching sounds that came from the shadows in the fallen buildings. When something meowed, I held on to her collar to prevent her from racing off on her own. But the only living thing we saw was a coyote down an alley. It carried a pink mannequin hand in its jaws and looked at us with its head cocked in curiosity before deciding we were bad news and trotting deeper into the shadows.

The city was a sad place, a lost place, a haunted place. But that didn’t mean it was a bad place. If I closed my eyes, I could almost imagine what it might have been, alive with millions of people hurrying to jobs, or singing, or dancing, arguing, loving, fighting. A population as varied as the building materials, all smashing together like atoms and creating energy. Here, I sensed possibility. Squandered possibility, maybe, but possibility nonetheless. Cracked and crumbling, dust and destruction, but a place that inspired dreams instead of just processing desires.

“Dudes,” I said, “the divisions suck.”

Sherman and Miss Spotty Pants agreed that they did.

No matter what, we would not go back.

• • • •

The city became less appealing when the bombing began.

With an eerie electronic vorp from the sky, a green spike of light struck the street. Bits of torn-up road sprayed everywhere, pelting us with gravel. We shrieked and ran like chickens with ignited BBQ lighters up their cloacas and scrambled toward the ruins of a pizza restaurant that was neither a Peevs nor a Wiggins but a Tonys, which might have been the name of an actual human being, when a bomb struck the roof. The windows blew out and felled the three of us with hot wind.

“Split up!” Sherman screeched, choking on black smoke.

“No, stay together!” I screamed back.

“Let’s find a bank,” Miss Spotty Pants suggested, a little more calmly.

“I don’t even know where my ATM card is!”

I was a tiny bit traumatized by now.

“Banks used to be more than ATMs,” Miss Spotty Pants said with an impatient bark. “They used to have inside parts too, and they kept the money in vaults. We can shelter in one.”

Purple sky machines with complex geometries sent down more laser spikes. Blooms of white and red fell everywhere, blasting the structures to bits. Glowing red crablike mechanisms descended upon the towers, crawling over them and eating their way down to the steel beams. Shards of glass fell, just glittering white flakes from this distance, like fairy dandruff, and we watched in open-mouthed fascination as the tower sank into itself with storm clouds of billowing debris.

Sherman and I saw the merits in Miss Spotty Pants’s suggestion. We chicken-ran until we found a solid-looking ruin with the word BANK carved into a slab of concrete above the missing doors. Stumbling as the earth beneath our feet trembled, we scrambled through ivy and fallen ceiling until we found the vault.

We huddled there, shaking and crying and clutching one another as the machine tempest continued to obliterate the city.

• • • •

At last the bombardment ended.

Leaving our shelter, we blinked at the sunlit sky like gophers peering out from their holes with hawks circling overhead. The bombs had finished the ancient towers, and even the debris-strewn streets and sidewalks had been reduced to little more than fine powder drifting against charred weeds.

We wandered along the red sediment that had once been bricks, trying to find my car. Miss Spotty Pants claimed she’d located where we’d parked it by smell, and I suppose it’s possible that the blackened slab of half-melted blobby stuff had once been my car.

Sherman began to dig through the wreckage with his hands.

“What are you looking for?” I asked him, numb.

“Fruit film snacks,” he said.

I shrugged and joined him, though when the best-case scenario is you get to eat another fruit film snack, you’ve really lowered your expectations in life.

Sherman started laughing a little.

“What’s so funny?”

He scooped handfuls of dust and gravel. “We’re the highest-stat people who live here,” he said. “We’re the cool kids.”

“That’s not a bad way of looking at it,” I said, and I laughed too.

Miss Spotty Pants called us idiots and bit both of us.

We weren’t alone for much longer. More machines arrived.

First came the vacuums, some of them as big as the buildings the bombs had destroyed. They rolled in on massive treads and sucked up the dust. Through some internal process, they formed new bricks and slabs that they expelled through their rear ends. Giant metal octopi trailed behind them and arranged the recycled building materials into shapes that soon became familiar. Colossal devices rolled through and left bands of pristine green grass in their paths, like reverse lawn mowers. Other machines built roads, and swarms of little helicopters sprayed all the buildings with stucco.

The whole process took slightly more than six hours.

The final thing to go up was a billboard. It read Oakview Springs, Good Living for Good Families, A Peevs Community. Within a day there was a Peevs Drugs and a Peevs Burgers and a Peevs 24-Hour Whatevers.

We chose a street at random, Meadowlark Avenue, and followed it to Meadowlark Way and turned down Meadowlark Lane. There was a still-empty house at the end of the cul-de-sac. Miss Spotty Pants pushed through the pet door and let us inside.

You have to live somewhere, after all.

After a few weeks, a family moved in. We never saw them, because the house had more bedrooms and bathrooms than it had people, so it wasn’t hard to hide. We subsisted on pilfered cereal and instant waffles and, of course, more fruit snacks. The family bought everything in massive quantities at Peevs BulkCo and didn’t notice the small amounts that went missing.

One morning I awoke to the sound of drones. Neither I nor Sherman nor Miss Spotty Pants was due statpacks because we weren’t on the division’s stat registry. But I wanted to go out and see the delivery anyway. Maybe out of nostalgia. Or maybe to remind myself that I’d accomplished what I set out to do, which was save Sherman from no-stat shame. I suppose that was even true if you squinted. The unexamined life was not worth living, wrote Socrates according to the Greek philosophy unit in Eight Ideas That Will Astonish You class. But then Socrates got to live in a real city.

So we tiptoed down the hallway, past shut bathroom doors. I heard the sounds of showers and hair dryers and chortles from Morning Hard News. It was almost like living with my own family. Maybe it even was my own family. Behind closed doors we are all the same.

Outside, we watched the drone swarm approach. The rooftop delivery ports opened like blossoms greeting the dawn, and the drones pollinated them with products.

“What do you think we look like to them?” Miss Spotty Pants said, squatting to pee.

Sherman pursed his lips, thinking about it. “We must look like stains.”

I hoped we did look like stains. Like glorious stains without status, marring the perfection of the endless sprawl.

©2016 by Greg van Eekhout. Originally published in 2113: Stories Inspired by the Music of Rush, edited by Kevin J. Anderson and John McFetridge. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Greg van Eekhout is the author of four novels for adults, five novels for middle-grade readers, and more than fifty short stories. His work has been nominated for the Nebula and Andre Norton awards and was included on the New York Public Library’s 2019 Best Children’s Books list. He lives in San Diego. For more information, visit writingandsnacks.com.

The Orange Tree

Maria Dahvana Headley | 10041 words

Shelter me in your shadow
Be with my mouth and my word
Watch over my ways
So I will not sin again with my tongue.

—Solomon ibn Gabirol, eleventh century

1.

Since the beginning of the world, there’ve been a thousand ways invented to be lonely. In a market stall, surrounded by speechless wooden wares, or banished to a black rock in the center of the sea. In a tower, feet forced into standing, floor too small for kneeling down, the only view a high window, the world below made of fire. On a road, parched, nothing but horizon. In the dark, visited by spirits jealous with their leavings.

At the tops of certain mountains there are places for those the world refuses, and at the bottoms of other mountains there are prisons for those the world regrets. There have been boulders installed for leapers once the never is too much.

The quiet is never quiet, not to the lonely. The quiet is full of newborn babies crying and lovers murmuring. The quiet is full of wineglasses and whippoorwills. Screaming quiet is the way the world lets a man know he’s alone forever, with no remedy but death or sorcery.

2.

Málaga isn’t a city where loneliness should overtake a man. Sweet milk, grapes and almonds, figs, lemons, bitter oranges, pomegranate, a view across the ocean from Spain to the coast of Africa. It’s beautiful everywhere, everywhere but where Solomon is. Wherever he steps, there is sorrow and pain.

Solomon’s come South from Saragossa to the city of his birth in a last attempt to heal himself. He’s saltfish. Something’s climbed beneath his skin, creating scabrous ridges on the sides of his ears and lips, and a cough, sometimes bloody. It isn’t leprosy, but it looks enough like it that the neighbors shun him. No medical man can help him, and no woman will have him.

Alone in his house, Solomon names a cloud of dust, picturing an Avra with delicate fingers and a quick smile. Then he sweeps her into the street and watches her blow away. God doesn’t permit men to knead dust into something with a heart. There is a short history of forbidden creations, a litany of longing. To defend a city, one might permissibly make a warrior of clay. One is not allowed to do that in order to fulfill selfish desires. There will be no blank-faced brides made of mud in Solomon’s house. There’s no hope of love now, not the way he looks. He’s spent twenty years describing the thousand ways, and no time on any softer arts.

The four-hundred-thirty-fourth way to be lonely is the loneliness of the sleepless, awake while the world is not, moon risen, bats with it. Small owls, and teeth in the walls. A coverlet made of sand, a bed made of blisters.

When Solomon wakes each morning, his mind is filled with words chewing at each other’s tails, tangling toes and tongues. Unspoken poems run through his house, little long-legged darknesses. When he’s on his pallet at night, words stand on their hind feet and stare at him. He can’t sleep, nor can he organize words into sentences. When he lights a candle, he sees books he’ll never finish. Words hide in the shadows and in the cracks in the walls, refusing to be written.

All he has are words, and none of them serve him. None of them even care for him.

Solomon sits alone at supper, taking figs from a dish painted with a lustered ship. He touches the ship’s outlines, the oars, the rigging.

Had he a ship, he might sail to some far off country where women had never seen men, and thus wouldn’t recognize him as a ruined specimen. He has no ship.

He idly makes a heap of fine sawdust and positions it across from him. Tziporah, he thinks, and then, realizing what he’s doing, brushes her abruptly from the table. That dust isn’t a wife.

Solomon spends an hour staring bitterly at the sky, mapping more of the ways of loneliness. The spheres above him, the sky filled with planets, and all of them are in love. He’s a solitary star in the process of dying, the last of a galaxy, the only point of light in a bad piece of darkness.

As a young man, he walked the roads of Andalusia, and mapped brightness instead of the night. Black lace on golden skin, copper glances, the gentle mouth of a serving maid as she circled the table with a jug of wine. He was invited to meals in fine houses, and published as a philosopher, but he made more enemies in such houses than friends. There was something wicked in his soul as well as in his skin. Perhaps the almighty means him to live in solitary misery, a scalded man, but he finds himself in rebellion.

There are options. Witchcraft or suicide. Death or sorcery. The choices are clear.

Solomon has two new texts, bought during his last travel North. He has, for years, called himself a translator, bartering and wheedling, when in truth he wanted these volumes for something else. He’s translated words, but he wants to translate other things. At last—this is his seventh night sleepless—he takes the books down and unwraps them from the linens that keep them safe from dust. The Banū Mūsā’s treatise on the construction of ingenious devices, and The Sefer Yetzirah. There are instructions in both, recipes for things more complicated than joy. Nothing in it is obvious, but he’s a poet. What he lacks in logic, he adds in lyric. He combines the instructions, and draws a diagram.

The five-hundred-ninety-third variety of loneliness is the loneliness of first light, a dawn unwitnessed by anyone else, sun rising over the sea, a cracking seam in the world.

When he was sixteen and ignorant of his future miseries, Solomon boasted, “I am the Song and the Song is my slave.” Even if that was true then, it’s no longer enough.

The two-hundred-fifth way to be lonely is to hear an echo and think it is the voice of a friend.

At twilight, Solomon dresses himself in a wide-brimmed hat, long gloves, a scarf about his throat and shoulders, a thin saffron-dyed robe, and a veil over his face. He goes into the Jewish quarter.

The nine-hundred-sixty-eighth variety of loneliness is the loneliness of planning magic and keeping it to oneself.

The moon rises as Solomon walks. It’s spring and the trees are in bloom, but Solomon prefers the stars: they’re brighter in winter. Lightning laughs in the distance. Nighttime is, at least, less lonely. He’s free of the house. No one draws back from him in horror, because his garb covers everything.

He passes a garden and smells salt, clove, and cinnamon. The sky blooms with the roses of Venus, constellations of pale pink nard, falling stars of jasmine. He stops to inhale, and imagines sharing what he’s seen. He could bring a wife a bouquet of all the flowers of this city, both poetic and actual. He could tell her every secret he’s stored in his skull, every desire for murder, every yearning for love. He could pile them all at her feet and wait for her to look up and smile at the precious things he’d given her. He’d tell her about the assassination of his mentor, the way he wandered adrift after it. He’d tell her about the hundreds of elegies he’s written, and about the grammars, the dictionaries. He’d recite them all from memory, until she knelt before him to tell him that it was time to sleep. He would go. He would not be an unreasonable husband.

At last he arrives at the orange grove.

“I need a tree,” says Solomon. “Not too small a tree.” He shows the grove man the size he means, stretching his arms.

“The entire tree?” the owner asks, looking at Solomon. “What will you do with a tree? How will you carry a tree?”

“The roots as well,” says the poet.

The treeseller sighs. “It won’t grow back, once it’s cut. The roots should stay here in the earth, to feed the ground.”

“The roots,” says Solomon again.

The seller takes Solomon’s coins, shrugging, and brings out his shovel. The five-hundred-sixth form of loneliness is the loneliness of drought, trees dropping their leaves and fruit, humbled by heat, a treeseller amongst them, praying in vain for the clouds to burst.

The treeseller shovels.

Solomon has a cart’s worth of orange tree in the end, and he hires a donkey to haul it.

The seven-hundred-thirteenth variety of loneliness is the loneliness of driving a cart back to town in the dark, a donkey breathing loudly, smelling blossoms. The oranges from these trees are too bitter to eat, but their blooms are perfumed with the smell of sweat and sex.

At the carpenter’s house, Solomon gives the carpenter the tree with its heady blossoms and wilting leaves, the roots a tangle of black soil and beetles. With the tree, he passes over a green glass cup from his own kitchen, and the lusterware dish painted with the ship. At last, he gives the carpenter his diagrams. He pays him in maravedís from the publication of The Fountain of Life, the only thing he’s written that seems likely to pay. Planets devoted to God, each one with its own section. He’s out of fashion now, he fears. No one pays for poetry.

“Hinged,” Solomon says, pointing at various places on the diagram. The carpenter usually makes doors. Solomon wonders if he’s literate.

He has no certainty, only longing. He’ll do the most difficult part of the magic himself, but for this part, the handwork, he has no skills. He goes home and waits, alone, alone, alone.

3.

“The poet’s commissioned a cabinet,” the carpenter tells his father. “But it’s a strange one. He insists I use the entire tree to build it, the shavings and the dust, the roots and the leaves, the flowers. It’ll take days of planing and shaping, and even then, I’ll have to bend the wood in too many places. He wants it hinged at every compartment, and he wants a musical instrument built into it. I don’t know what to tell him.”

The carpenter’s father shakes his head, and so the carpenter goes to his mother. She’s not from Spain at all, but from a city across the sea. She has different skills than those his father possesses.

“He pays us well for this?” she asks.

The carpenter shows the coins, looking uneasily at the branches he’s meant to shape.

“Well enough,” she says, counting them. She examines the diagram with interest, annotating it, drawing the outlines of an instrument from her homeland. At last she scratches in another small alteration, a tiny compartment to be placed deep within the creation, and sealed.

“I should not make this,” the carpenter says. “It will offend.”

The carpenter’s mother glances sharply at him. “The commission is a kind of cabinet, whatever it looks like. Deny what you’ve made if anyone asks who made it. But we’ll take his payment.”

She hides the poet’s coins away in her apron, then brings her son sheets of metal, pounded thin, a curved knife, and a tiny hammer. She consults the diagram again, goes to the market, and returns with a stillborn goat, bought for its tender hide, and the tanned skin of a doe. She brings tools for carving and stitching: awls, a vial of a particular oil, sand for polishing.

What the poet has commissioned is no sin to her people. The desert has wandering fountains, and the holy have help.

The thirty-ninth form of loneliness is the loneliness of a woman who can see her home from across a sea, but cannot return to it. The loneliness of childbirth in a foreign land, none of the rituals, none of the other women. The loneliness of a marriage made across a table, cooking food, the sound of men talking the language of this country, not of the one you came from.

The carpenter’s wife comes from a family whose men made objects for kings. Her son and husband are not what she’d have chosen for herself, had she been doing the choosing. If she were a man, she’d have spent her life working metal and dark wood, inlaying it with gemstones and camel bones.

Instead, she lives on the southern coast, looking over the water at the weather of the continent she’s lost.

So the carpenter and his mother work the wood of the orange tree, sanding and polishing, putting in hinges. They work at night when the other work is done, and in the dark, the workshop fills with the scent of sap, fruit, and pitch. There are the sounds of strings being plucked and then bowed, the sounds of taut leather being tapped. The carpenter’s mother adds an instrument from her home, and while she builds the instrument she sings the songs it should play.

The carpenter’s mother sits on her heels, looking at the blistered hearth where the fire caught out of control one afternoon beneath a spitted goat. The goat, with its twisted horns and yellow eyes, is long gone, but she remembers its voice, the song it sang, beheaded. She takes a handful of the ash, presses it hard into her palm, shapes it.

Her son crouches beside her. “People want strange things,” he says. “Nothing I’d wish for.”

“Most people don’t,” she says, working the ash, adding a tiny piece of parchment with something scrawled upon it, a word in her own language, and then more ash. “Most people want things to remain the same forever, but the world changes, and we change with it.”

She pets the wood, finds a long splinter and tests its sharpness. She soaks it carefully in the oil until it shines. Perhaps things like this cabinet are made all over the world, and always have been, but she only knows them from her home city, and then only small ones, playthings for the wealthy. This one is different.

She kneels, and opens doors, until she arrives at the secret door hidden deep within the commission. She places her handful of ash there, a gift to it.

The carpenter’s mother closes that door again and seals it with beeswax. She closes the next door and the next, until all the doors are tightly shut.

4.

The golem isn’t alive, and then she is.

The first loneliness is the loneliness of birth. The golem opens her eyelid hinges, delicate doe leather. Her eyes are cold and dry, but she can see the man she’s been created to serve, standing over her.

“You,” he says. “You.”

The golem has pale yellow-brown skin, smoothly sanded. Her hair is made of creamy white flowers with canary streaks, and there are shining green leaves throughout it. She smells of biting honey. She’s small and slender, her waist narrow. No taller than he is. Her arms show the tracks of the tools that made her. There’s a gouge between her breasts where there was a knot in the orange tree’s trunk.

The poet has hammered one of the secret names of God into her palate, and this is what has brought her to life. She tries to speak but she has no tongue. There is a pain, a stabbing where the silver tablet is. She can’t tell what it is, only that it hurts.

It stretches inside of her body, a tentacled name. There is a loneliness in this too, the two-hundred-sixty-seventh, the loneliness of the only name one can speak being unspeakable.

“My name is Solomon ibn Gabirol,” the man says, and blinks nervously. “You are my wife and servant. You’ll help me write. I’ve need of someone to keep my words contained.”

She examines the man before her. His hair is turning white, and his skin is red, black, and yellow. His cracked flesh bleeds. Salt water runs from his eyes.

Solomon, she mouths. There is no sound.

“Yes,” he says. “You’re a thing made for me.”

The man feeds her a piece of paper, on which is written a line of a poem, and then he feeds her another. They taste like termite, wasp, worm. A hinge creaks in her jaw.

She’s never seen a man before, not from this angle. She wants to take his tears and use them for some purpose. A ship, she thinks, catching a bewildering taste of his old thoughts. On a salt sea. An island where they have never seen a woman.

She tries to make a noise, but only a rattle comes out. There’s a lock on her lips, a bent metal hook through a bent metal eye, and he has latched it. He takes her through his house, showing her its rooms.

“You’ll clean for me,” he says. “You’ll rid my house of dust.”

She understands. She begins to shovel with her hands. She buries her fingers in the mess, and thinks of rooting there, falls to her side and stretches, planting herself, but he pulls her up, telling her he wishes her to sweep the dirt, not roll in it like a sow.

She learns quickly. She’s made to learn.

5.

When he ordered her, Solomon gave only the measures of the golem’s body, writing figures in the margins of his diagram. The carpenter was no sculptor. The golem is full in the hips and breasts, but one breast is bigger than the other, and her hips are tilted.

She has no heart, and no soul. She is therefore no sin.

This is what Solomon thinks to himself when he is trying to sleep in a house in which he is no longer alone.

Solomon’s diagrams included no more than suggestions for her face. She therefore has crude features, a mosaic of lustered ceramic for a mouth, and green glass eyes neither the same size nor the same shape. One is oval, and the other is wide and round. The lids, at least, are neat half-moons. Her nose is an angled slope with a bump at the bridge where the grain of the orange tree arcs. She has only an approximation of a woman’s looks, but her hinges are perfect. All over her body, there are metal hinges, and wooden ones, leather hinges, and string ones.

She’s held together to come apart.

Sometimes, after the first days when she has to be kept from dropping in the garden and pressing her long fingers into the soil, or from standing too many hours outside with her face upturned, waiting for bees to land on her skin, the poet opens a door in her abdomen to remove a word and use it in a sentence. He talks more and more, all day, all night. He paces the room, telling her of injustices, years of woe, jealous companions and patrons murdered. He tells her of his childhood and his disease. He reports every injury done to him, and then writes more lines and feeds them to her.

“My throat is parched with pleading,” he scribbles. “I am buried in the coffin of my home. I combine my blood with my tears, and stir my tears into my wine. I am treated as a stranger, despised—as though I were living with ostriches, caught between thieves and fools, who think their hearts have grown wise.”

Solomon wonders why he still feels lonely. What kind of loneliness is this? One that hasn’t been given a number. It makes him itch, all over, everything from his fingertips to his brain.

6.

The golem is busy. She sweeps the house’s dust into the street. She washes the clothes. She clatters on the stones of his floor, her feet too loud in the night, and sometimes she sits, looking out the window, waiting for him to wake, breathing in the new dust that falls from the old walls of the city. She doesn’t sleep or eat. She has no need for it.

He writes a list of his enemies and puts them into her mouth. He wants them dead or forgotten, himself remembered. He burns his name onto her wooden skin, a thin line of characters, black and smudged, a circle around her wrist. She looks at the words, curious. They’re nothing magical. He is, for all his labor and verse, an ordinary man.

I am your thing, she thinks. Thing. She has no name. It is his job to give her one, and he has not.

The poet writes poems, and the golem walks in circles. She lifts his pallet with one hand, to dust around and beneath it. She beats a rug with her fist.

There is a thumping and pleasurable loneliness in this, the loneliness of a drummer in the desert, pounding a sound into leather, untethered by any city. She pounds the rug and feels a song inside herself, the song of falling oranges in a storm, the noise of their ripe roundness rolling away. The rug is silk, and she ravels a strand of scarlet loose and wraps it around her fingers, weaving it through her hinges. There is pleasure in this too, the feeling of an orange tree surrounded by dancers, the feeling of a gourd strung across by strings. She pulls the silk through her hands, stretching it, thinking of spiderwebs. She was once companioned by hundreds of spiders, each one using her branches as an anchor for an instrument of its own, fishing at night. She unravels the whole rug and makes a delicate web in a doorway.

“What is that?”

She has no answer, of course. She’s standing beside her web, moving silk over silk, patterning the web to mimic the ones she’s seen in her own twigs. With dawn there would be dew on each thread, and the spider in the center, waiting quietly for whatever might be drawn to something with so much gleam.

“This is nothing you’ll do again,” he says to her, taking the threads in his fist, tugging at them until they detach. He takes the tangled silk and throws it over the cliff. She watches it unspool, red loops caught in the wind, spun strings. Scarlet words in the air for a moment and then gone.

The loneliness of a bird trapped in a web, its wings twisting backward as it swings, struggling, and trapped. The spider’s venom, the twisting of thread to cover the beak, the glittering eyes, the feet and flight. The loneliness of being too much body to eat, and killed anyway. A mummified silence, a veiled singer dangling from a chain of silver threads.

Solomon leaves her mouth unlocked one night, and she tests it, stretching the hinges, coughing up half a poem. She feels dirty, and so she goes out into the rain and opens nearly every door in her body.

She thinks of sap. There are roots inside her, her stomach and her intestines made of them, and she places a hand on the ground and takes water from the soil. The sun is part of her skin, and so are the wind and the salt from the sea. She’s three hundred years old, and grew from an orange seed dropped by a gull. She’s birthed thousands of oranges, and they’ve fallen from her boughs, taken into the ocean, and into compote dishes. A few of them grew into trees.

Now she’s a golem, but she’s still what she used to be.

In the morning, the poet finds her with her head still upturned, and screams at her, fearful of rust stiffening her smallest hinges.

She looks toward the blaze on the horizon, her jaws wide for the rain until he closes them again, muttering that his hidden words will get wet. He locks her mouth. She grinds her tiny wooden teeth, tasting dust, which she swallows, but she isn’t built for anger at her maker.

She’s seen the stars now, and she longs to see them again. They’re familiar, the green haloes around them, the way the bird-hunting bats swoop and hang from her fingers, the way darkness turns to dawn, bleeding at the edge of the sky.

7.

The poet brings her inside the house, and locks the front door, just as he locked her lips.

“You must be as a wife,” Solomon says, his hands shaking. “That is what you were created to do.”

The house is very clean. He arranges her on the bed, and she opens for him. She is built to do this. Her diagrams were clear. The secret hinges he requested are small and soft, made of the leather of the stillborn goat. They unfold, door after door, until the second to last door unhinges. He shoves himself inside it.

There’s still the final sealed compartment. He doesn’t know it exists. Nothing of him gets in.

The golem wonders suddenly if the house is like her, if she’s inside the mouth of a larger golem. The loneliness of the motherless daughter, the loneliness of the daughter eaten by the mother, the loneliness of a roomful of wooden teeth. She looks at the chairs and table. She looks up over the poet’s shoulder to see if the name of God is hammered to the ceiling. The loneliness of the result of magic.

When he’s finished with her, the golem’s doors shut themselves, one by one. She stands up and sands herself; there’s a spot of blood on her breast from a wound on his. Sawdust flies until she’s clean again. He coughs blood, and curses. She sweeps the dust away.

He gives her a chestnut to crack between her teeth. She hands him the meat and keeps the shell for herself to suck. It’s like a nub of tongue. The golem makes a tiny sound, balancing it in her mouth, a rattle. She wedges it there with her fingers, pressed against the metal name.

She feels liquid drip down her wooden thigh. Startled, she closes the doors tighter.

“I thought I’d be happy with you.” Solomon says from the pallet. “But you’re not a real woman. You’re a thing I made.”

You didn’t make me, she thinks. I grew.

With the shell in her mouth, she makes a tiny noise, a moaning sound, not a word, but not the sound of nothing. She chirrs a note. Everything that ever sang through her branches, every gust of wind, every bat, every bee, every bird. They all spoke to her and she spoke back to them when she was a tree. Now she is a hinged woman, muted by magic, and she moves the shell in her mouth, looking for a voice she’s not been made to have.

8.

Solomon gets up, dresses in his loosest garments, and writes. His skin is boils and snakes. His bones feel breakable, and even his thoughts feel diseased. Talking doesn’t help his loneliness. He wants to have her again, because she is all he’ll ever have.

She isn’t what he wants. He had a different woman in mind. Copper glances, black lace, a living woman willing to wrap him in bandages, a woman willing to carry him to a warm tub, a woman to cure his agonies.

This one is cold and has no heart. This one is ugly and has no mind. She’s only an orange tree.

He writes of the loneliness of the poet, years of shunning, the way his life has bent itself into a hoop of suffering. He writes of the eight-hundred-sixty-first form of loneliness, the loneliness of the scratching quill plucked from some dead swan. He writes of the forty-eighth form of loneliness, the loneliness of the moment of orgasm, when all the sky rushes from the blue and into the sea, leaving nothing in its place.

He goes to the golem and stares at her, considering the conditions of the magic. He asks for one thing he hasn’t had yet.

“Play me a song,” he says. “It’s too quiet.”

9.

The golem is surprised to discover that she’s made of music. She has no tongue, but she has noise.

The golem’s body is a chamber. There are strings made of silk, and a curved bow inside one of the cabinets of her thigh. When she threads three strings through tiny holes drilled in her sternum, and another set just below her stomach, she can play the rabāb. This was part of her diagram, any instrument, and the carpenter’s mother chose this one from her own home. There is a thin membrane of doeskin, tanned and stretched taut over the cavity of the cabinet, and this skin vibrates.

She plays the tunes given her by the carpenter’s mother, songs of the desert, songs of another religion. There are S-shaped openings in her stomach from which the song pours.

She draws the bow across the strings, filling with greater and greater pleasure, until the poet waves his hand, goes to his bed, and waits for her to stop the noise and come to him.

10.

There’s a hard storm that night, and all the pomegranates fall. The golem goes into the street at dawn and kneels to collect them, each one as large as a baby’s head.

“Who are you?” a woman says, and the golem looks up, startled, her fingers pushing through the pomegranate’s skin and deep into the seeds, groping for something.

The woman is standing over her, looking horrified, and when the golem raises her face, the woman screams, and backs away, gasping.

The golem feels the seeds slick and fat between her fingers. She crushes some, and juice runs out into the dirt. There are tiny ants all over the fruit, and she feels their bodies crushing too, their certainty that they might carry something so tremendous. She feels sorry for that.

“What are you?” the woman says, and makes a gesture of protection. “Demon,” she whispers, and runs, dropping her basket.

The golem goes back into the house.

She curls into the cold fireplace, a heap of sticks, and stays there through the day and until the next morning, though Solomon shouts for her when she brings no evening meal.

Her blossoms are falling off. The petals are dropping, and she feels as though she will soon be naked. When the petals are gone, though, there are oranges, tiny green ones. Her skull is beaded with them.

The loneliness of the bee seeking nectar, the journey between trees, a wavering flight, a humming and thrum. The loneliness of the pale flower, a channel of gold at its center, dew and dawn and a white room.

In the morning, she raises Solomon’s bed with him on it, and sweeps the dust from beneath it. She swabs water over the new wounds on his skin. He is weak and fevered. She wonders if he will die.

“You serve me,” he croaks. She feels her doors opening. She has no say in it.

11.

Solomon presses into her, looking down at her still face, pushing against her hard flesh. He is too sick to leave the house at all. Too sick to enjoy anything. His skin feels like a board being planed, shaven, the scraps tread on by goats. He needs a diet of milk and honey, a balm of olive oil. She can’t fetch any of it for him. He is a monster and she is a cabinet. Neither of them can go into the street.

He considers the precious word that brought her to life. He means to pry it loose. She’ll be firewood at least. This has been a failure.

“You’re not what I wanted,” he says when he is finished.

He puts his fingers to the corner of her mouth, intending to open the hinges and remove God from her.

12.

As Solomon approaches her, the golem feels a startling jolt deep inside her body. Something sealed begins to unseal; something forbidden begins to reveal itself. She holds the innermost cabinet door shut, feeling the hinges stretching, the thing behind it trying to be loose. If the poet notices her alarm, he says nothing.

There is shouting from the street. Solomon withdraws from her. The golem smoothes her dress. The poet rearranges his robes. The oranges are ripening. The room is heavy with their smell, sweat and sweetness.

The door inside the golem’s body, the last and smallest door, the last and smallest hinge, shakes and swells. She keeps it closed. She refuses. Whatever is in there, it can stay locked behind the door. Liquid on her thigh. She closes all the doors with ferocious resolution.

Men shout to enter. Solomon ties a patterned cloth about her head, over the lumpy oranges.

“Qasmūna,” he says. “Your name is Qasmūna. You’re a housemaid.”

Her fists open and close convulsively as the door pounds.

She wonders if she’ll kill his enemies. That is what she was made to do.

13.

The men surge into the house, bearded and cloaked. There are five of them, and they’re all elderly, years beyond Solomon. He knows them. The elders are the ones who kept him in this house, unable to walk amongst humans. When he arrived in the city, he was shunned. It was only their permission and their memories of his parents, long dead, that allowed him to live here at all, to stop walking the roads. Otherwise, he’d be dead somewhere, parched and dried to leather.

It might be better than this.

He thinks for a moment that he can take them all, pulverize them. He might crush them into a cupboard and barricade them there. He might make them into the contents of a cabinet, dishes asking to be broken. Then he remembers that they’re living men, not his creation. He’s lost his understanding of the nature of the world. He is a sickly poet, and they are the men in charge of the city.

The men circle the room, staring at the golem, who stands in the center, waiting, trembling. She’s a tree full of birds, and they’re foxes.

“What have you done?” they shout at Solomon, and he lies to them, though it’s futile. They’re holy men with long beards and hundreds of years between them. They know his books and they know the history of his books. They know every corner of the law. Solomon feels himself surrounded by poems he will never write. He’ll be taken to executioners. It troubles him for a moment, and then it doesn’t. He’ll stab out their eyes as he goes. He’ll scream his own elegy from his last moments. It’s already written and stored inside his cabinet.

“This creature is no woman, Solomon ibn Gabirol,” says one. “Do you take us for fools?”

“She’s nothing more than a housemaid,” Solomon says calmly. “Her name is Qasmūna, and she came from Saragossa. I brought her here to tidy my house and care for me. You know that I’ve been ill.”

The loneliness of capture, the loneliness of guilt, a single intruder caught and tied, burned at the stake. The loneliness of fire touching feet, the loneliness of stones flying toward a target. All he wanted was a wife.

This is no sin, he thinks. This is not a sin. She’s a housemaid, and Solomon has a house that needs cleaning. He has a heart that needs polishing. He has a body that needs a companion. He cannot see the problem. There is a map inside his mind of all the sins, and he doesn’t believe in most of them. This one? To build a woman out of wood? How could it be wrong? To use her as a wife? She has no heart and she has no soul. She’s an instrument and he has played her properly. That’s what he’ll say. That’s how he’ll argue.

One of the men nearly touches the golem, and then stops, his fingers inches from her hand. He leans forward and shakes his head.

“This is not a maid,” he insists, then lifts a metal cup, and raps it against her wrist. It makes the sound of an axe meeting a tree. “No. We know what this is.”

The golem opens her mouth hinge, slightly, to show her teeth. In her mouth, the nub of tongue rattles, and she makes a tiny noise, a cry. A string within her body vibrates and makes a sighing tone.

“We do not know fully,” another man protests. He looks at the golem, skeptical. “Solomon ibn Gabirol isn’t holy enough to make a golem. He’s not held in grace. Perhaps she’s simply ugly. Open your mouth wider, girl, show us what you have,” he says.

She shows her teeth a little more, and her sound grows louder, a humming rattle, a clicking. Her eyelid hinges blink, quickly, a leathery brush against the green glass.

One of the men leans forward and taps her eye with a spoon. She flinches. It rings like a bell calling for prayers.

“She’s a living woman,” says Solomon, fearful of punishment, but angry too. His fingers curl around the tabletop.

“She is not,” one of the men says, and looks at Solomon with something approaching kindness. “Shelomo ben Yehuda ibn Gabirol, you are too lonely. You are fortunate we’ve come to help. No one knows you’ve done this, not yet, and we will save you from this sin for the sake of your father.”

14.

The golem trembles, bound to protect Solomon. She feels his rage like a windstorm bending her trunk. She is a newborn woman and she is a rabāb full of the songs of an entire country of travelers. She is a tree with hundreds of years of history.

She removes the bow from the cabinet in her thigh and starts to play the strings in her abdomen. The song is not a hymn. The song is a wild high flight from some other shore, the song of a woman shouting in a ship across the sea. The song of the strings bends and weeps, and she plays, her head bowed, while the bow in her hand moves quickly. Tongueless, she is telling them what will happen, but they don’t listen.

“Speak,” says one of the men.

“She can’t,” says Solomon. “She doesn’t speak our language.”

I am speaking, Qasmūna plays. I am warning you. You should leave.

“This is a sin. More than a sin. To fornicate with this. Speak in Spanish, you serving maid. Speak in Arabic. Speak in Hebrew. Speak any language at all.”

Qasmūna plays harder, her wooden fingernails stopping the strings, the bow calling forth the sound of women seizing a ship’s crew and tearing them apart. The loneliness of the shore with no one landing on it in a year. The loneliness of hunger. She is an orange tree clinging to a cliffside, oranges falling into the sea. She is a forgotten wife clinging to a village full of forgotten children. She is called to war while the men are at another war. She and her sisters march over the Atlas Mountains. She and her sisters sing warcries, play their instruments, light signal fires.

“SPEAK!” a man shouts. “Or we will know what you are.”

I am speaking, the golem plays. Hear me. Leave before you can’t leave.

Qasmūna can see veins bulging in Solomon’s neck. Her hinges flutter. The secret door inside her shakes loudly enough that the men can hear it. It is unsealing. It is opening. She can’t help it.

“This is not a sin,” argues another holy man. “She doesn’t need to be cleansed after menstruation, for she doesn’t menstruate. She can’t procreate. She can’t speak, nor has she any intelligence. She’s less than an animal. It can’t be fornication if she isn’t a woman.”

“Her lack of speech reflects the flaw in her creator,” the first man says. “He’s not holy enough.”

The golem listens to them argue over whether she is holy or only wooden. She plays. They look at her in annoyance. She is an instrument and she plays the music she is filled with. She bends and draws the bow over the strings, playing an attack on a tent, playing a moon rising over bloodied sand. They don’t understand her. She attempts to give them a final warning, but they are too busy with their debate.

15.

Solomon rages, but doesn’t dare do it with his voice. The golem is playing some tilting tune, and he can’t get her to stop. Her music is nothing he’d have chosen. Why did he not kill her last night? She could be in the fireplace, heating the house. She could be rising through the chimney, her smoke a small cloud in the sky.

This was a mistake, but now that they are trying to take her from him, he wants her back. Who are they to deny him a wife?

“You must destroy this golem, Solomon ibn Gabirol,” concludes the man most in charge. “For though it may not be a sin in the eyes of the law, you’re a poet, not a holy man, and you have made a monstrosity for yourself, not for any city. This is forbidden.”

“She’s not a monstrosity,” pleads Solomon. “She’s my housemaid. She cleans the dust.” His wounds are bleeding. He coughs, wet and red.

The loneliness of seeing one’s own blood on a white cloth. The loneliness of a disease impervious to magic, to knowledge, to weather. He is dying, and there is no one to take care of him. He is dying, and soon he will be like an infant, helpless and howling. Soon he will be a body in a bed, bones like kindling.

The thousandth form of loneliness is the loneliness of the dead, rotting just beneath the ground. There will be worms and insects, there will be birds pecking at the earth, but there will be nothing to love any man underneath the world. The thousandth loneliness is a grave with fresh shovel marks, the noise of the dirt being packed down above. He will be, he realizes, down where the orange tree roots snake in the dark, white wooden bones hard as stones.

“You’ll remove the name of our lord from her mouth. You’ll destroy her, and you’ll burn her materials.” The men nod. “You’ll do it now, for these witnesses, or you yourself will be put to death. Take her apart now. We will watch.”

Solomon sways. He’s still living, he thinks. His prick pulses. He must retaliate. He must fight.

There’s a creak in the room, and a muffled pounding.

“Defender,” Solomon whispers to his golem. “Defend.”

The golem is already standing, staring at the old man before her. She raises a hand, and looks at it. Slowly she brings her fist down on the man’s skull, a neat rapping. He cries out and falls. The holy men scream.

Solomon watches her push her fingers into one of the men’s mouths, her fist pressing deeper, deeper until she finds the root of his tongue. She tears out the meat of his voice and crushes it, a splattering gore beneath her foot. Solomon makes a sound, whether of vengeance or of protest, he can’t say. He looks at the holy tongue for a moment, watching it bleed, then doubles over, vomiting.

The sound of something breaking open. He turns to see the golem and the last of the holy men, his skull vised in her two hands. She looks at Solomon, her face blank, and there is a grievous crack, sending blood spraying. Her mouth rattles and she breaks the man’s neck for good measure, as though he is a hen.

16.

The loneliness of being the last man alive in a room filled with the dead is the nine-hundred-ninety-ninth loneliness.

They’re all murdered in his house, the holy men of Málaga. Solomon won’t die of illness as he’d imagined. He’ll be executed. He has to flee the city, but he can’t flee with her. He gathers himself. She has saved him and damned him at once. It can’t be his fault. No one would think it was. He would never order his golem to kill for him.

“Open your mouth,” Solomon orders his golem. “Give me the name. Take it out, and give it to me.”

Slowly, the golem’s jaw hinges open, showing the poet the name of God. One of her hands reaches up to remove it.

There is the sound of a sealed door opening. Something changes in the room.

Solomon looks down at the golem’s chair. There’s a creature in it, small and black, made of ash. It stands, its arms outstretched, a tiny thing, and it shakes the room with a high, wild song, a song like the rabāb and like a singer too, a song of loneliness beyond number. It sings a horde of women in open space, raging across a landscape, swords raised.

Solomon clenches all over. Can he smash it? With a dish, perhaps, or a text. It’s small enough. It’s no animal or insect he’s seen. A rough black creature, the size of a closed fist. The song is something . . . Solomon tilts his head. His ears feel penetrated.

“What’s that?” Solomon manages. “Where did it come from?”

Qasmūna picks the creature up and cradles it. The ash looks at Solomon, its eyes glittering. In its fist, it holds a splinter of orange wood.

A splinter held by a tiny thing. That’s nothing. No sword, no matter the feelings roused in him by its song. Whatever those feelings were, they are falsehoods, defenses without teeth. Women running over sand, bloodied swords. This is only a small aberration. He’ll consider it later, when this is all done.

What it is, Solomon doesn’t know, but it doesn’t matter. He’ll dismantle the golem and it’ll die with her. There will be a heap of wood, leather, metal and string. There’ll be some metal hinges, some green oranges. He’ll toss it all over the cliff edge. He feels a little stronger suddenly, purposeful. He’ll dress and put his books in a sack. He’ll hire a cart.

The loneliness of the fleeing poet. The road before him, the dust, the cart rattling, the bones pained. The loneliness he is well accustomed to, traveling by himself, wandering book stalls at night, reading texts he procures from the darkest, dustiest stacks. He will write two hundred verses in mourning for the golem, he decides. He’ll write of her smooth skin and fragrant hair, her green eyes and sharp teeth.

He hears the golem moving, and turns to find her quite close to him. She hasn’t listened to his request. Why has she not given him the name? Is the magic flawed?

Solomon clasps his golem’s wrist, groping for her jaw hinge, but the golem’s golem is there, standing on his arm. It stabs the splinter into the poet’s hand, deep into the vein at the top.

“You are my thing!” Solomon shouts at her. “My wife!”

She says nothing. There’s only that high song from the ash, and the golem, moving the bow across the strings in her stomach. Red threads. A web, Solomon thinks. A spider.

Solomon runs for the door, but almost instantly he’s too ill to run, too ill to walk. He falls, shaking and vomiting, feeling his body dismantling itself from the inside out. He’s made of hinges and all of them are bending, all the doors inside his body too far open, his heart dropping through staircases, his kidneys swollen, his eyes watering and blasting agony. His skin is shedding and he is a snake. His hinges are rusting and he’s alone on a rainy road, floodwater rising. The loneliness of the poet muted. His hands are claws. His mouth feels thick and his throat is closing.

17.

Qasmūna goes to him. She is built to serve, to defend, to protect, and her protections include the cessation of misery. She gives Solomon the juice of bitter oranges in a green glass cup, gently, a drop at a time from her finger. This is all there is left to do. She knows that much.

His heart thunders but after a time, he’s quiet.

She picks him up from the floor and carries him, not gently. Now he’s only a body, not a master. She ferries him from the house, and with her hands she digs a grave in the garden beneath the roots of a fig tree.

This not loneliness in this garden. The company of trees, the conversation of birds, the discussions between wasps and fruit. The pollen of flowers and the high pallor of clouds. She looks up and breathes in. She spits out the inadequate nutshell, and takes a twig from the tree. She works the twig into the space in her mouth, behind the name of God.

The tiny golem watches her, prepared to defend her city, prepared to do what it is golems do. As she pushes her new tongue into place, a door opens in her chest.

The golem’s golem places itself inside the compartment there, a compartment that has previously been perfectly empty, and the hinges close.

Qasmūna’s heart beats. The strings of her instrument vibrate.

She speaks a word.

18.

A season passes, and the walled garden grows wild.

The fig tree bears fruit, and the carpenter’s mother crosses over the wall and onto the poet’s land to pick before the birds and bats can eat them. She can see slender yellow bones bending up from the soil beneath the tree, fingers, and a jaw, long since picked clean by animals. The earth is especially dark here, a bright russet soil, and the bones are beautiful, like jewelry lost after a night’s dancing. The carpenter’s mother steps barefoot on the dirt and packs it down, leaving it smooth.

She reaches up and plucks figs, dropping them into her smock. The figs are heavy and green, their centers scarlet. The carpenter’s mother eats one as she stands in the garden, looking out toward the country that was hers before this one.

She hums a song about marching through sand, a song about homecoming after war. The song can only be played on the rabāb, and the tune runs counter to the music, a twisting blade sung at night while the washing’s being wrung. When she was a girl, all the women sang this song at once, and when the men returned from wherever men went, they were nervous at the patterns the women’s feet had made in the dust, the way they’d danced together beneath the moon.

Months have passed. The carpenter’s mother knows nothing of where Solomon ibn Gabirol has gone. He walked in one day, and surely he walked away the same. His kitchen was full of coins for a time after he disappeared. Then the coins went into the carpenter’s mother’s apron as payment for a cabinet.

She knows nothing of where the holy men have gone, either. She saw nothing late in the night all those months ago, beneath a moon like a blossom. She heard no music playing, no mournful joyful strings, no echoing resonance and thrum. Those songs were unfamiliar to her. They sounded nothing like wandering fountains in the desert, nothing like shining things made of metal and silk.

The carpenter’s mother never saw a woman walking out from the house of Solomon ibn Gabirol, her feet clattering across the stones of the street. A stranger to Málaga! She didn’t see that woman lifting five men, and throwing them tenderly, one by one, from the cliffs, nor did she see her digging here, beneath the fig tree.

She didn’t see the woman step off the rock path, and walk down to the harbor. Nor did she see her open a door in her abdomen, and remove a thousand pages of words, sections from poems, scribbled lines and wishes. She didn’t see her tear these until each word was left lonely, and then begin to rearrange them.

She didn’t see this, the carpenter’s wife would swear, if anyone asked her. No one will ask her. She’s an old woman, and must know little of the world. She’s been here too long to read and too long to write. Too long to know anything of the world of magic.

But how quickly that wooden woman went, arranging poem after poem, the words of the poet who called her from the trees taken and changed. She took all the poet’s words and made new things with them, a line on the sand.

When she was finished, she looked up at the old woman standing on the cliff.

The old woman, of course, saw nothing.

She didn’t watch the wooden woman place herself in a boat, take the oars in her strong hands, and begin to row.

Surely, no mother of Málaga would let a murderess of so many men, all the intellectuals of this part of the coast, all of the holy, and a philosopher poet too, surely no carpenter’s wife would let a murderess go free.

19.

On the night the golem left Spain, after it was fully dark, the carpenter’s mother climbed down the rocks to the shore. This much was true. She would say it, if she were asked.

The poem on the sand was written in a language she could read, and she thought for a moment about the market stalls in her homeland, the words scrolling over her fingertips, the things made by her father and brothers, brought to life by her own blood and spit.

In dreams, she inlaid a mother of pearl woman with coral, camel bones, ebony eyes. In dreams, she breathed into the woman’s lips and sent her to kill those who would sell a talented daughter to wed a lowly carpenter on the southern coast of Spain. Her life is no horror, but it is no glory, either, and who would imagine that a carpenter’s wife would be full of poetry, full of spells, a maker of women? She could cause a fountain to spring from the desert, and here she is, sold, sold and spelled, daughter to a magician long dead. She’ll never go home again, because the water will refuse her.

She read the poems Qasmūna left for her. Some had already caught the wind and blown out into the salt by the time she’d made it down the cliff, but two remained.

O gazelle, tasting leaves,
here in the green of my garden.
Look at my eyes. Dark and lonely,
just as yours are.
How distant we are from our beloveds, and how forgotten
Standing in the night,
Waiting for fate to find us.

The carpenter’s mother looked up, listening to the song coming over the water. She ate a fig and tasted the wasp that had pollinated it, the bones of the poet that had fed it. The second poem was shorter.

The garden is filled with fruit on the vines, but the gardener
refuses to brush a finger over the skin of even one piece.
How sad it is! The season of splendor passes,
and the fruit that ripens only in darkness
Remains lonely.

The gulls followed the wooden woman into a new life, out from Spain and over the sea, but that is nothing the carpenter’s mother will admit to knowing. She’s merely an old woman sitting in the dark, listening to the sounds of a creature made of ash, and one made of wood, singing their way away.

She sits there a long time beneath the stars, before she writes the poems onto a piece of cloth, before she walks barefoot down the road to another town with them, before she puts them into the hands of a songseller.

“Where did these come from?” the seller asks.

“A woman,” she tells him. “Qasmūna.”

“Who is her father?” he asks. “Who is her husband?”

“She has neither,” the carpenter’s wife says, knotting the scrolls with red silk thread. “Will you buy them?”

Coins are never lonely. They clack and ring out, and the carpenter’s wife holds them in her palm, though soon they’ll disappear like the kind of shining moths which land for only a moment to drink, before lighting again into the night.

HISTORICAL NOTE

The legend of the wooden golem created by the Andalusian Hebrew poet Solomon ibn Gabirol (1021-c.1058) is much less known than that of Rabbi Loew and the Golem of Prague, perhaps because ibn Gabirol’s golem was a (rare) female golem brought to life not as a defender, but as a housemaid and likely bedmate. The historic ibn Gabirol was a complicated and brilliantly prolific intellectual figure, a reclusive misanthrope who suffered from a skin disease, possibly cutaneous tuberculosis. His poetry is filled with feelings of ostracisation and rage relating to same—he complains about jealous enemies, among other things—though he also wrote rapturous and religiously ecstatic poems regarding the planets, the gardens of the sky, and laughing lightning. In the accounts, ibn Gabirol was forced to destroy his hinged golem after being accused of fornicating with her. The legend typically comes up in discussions of personhood in Jewish law—and the debate in Hinge is typical of that discussion. The Sefer Yetzirah, in which mystical information related to golem creation is traditionally thought to be found, was a significant influence on ibn Gabirol’s work, and he translated sections of it. The Banū Mūsā’s Book of Ingenious Devices was written in the ninth century, and contains instructions for creating a variety of automata. The legend of ibn Gabirol’s murder and burial beneath a fig tree is historical, though used to new ends here.

• • • •

The rabāb is a stringed instrument still played all over the world, an ancestor of the violin (which wasn’t invented until after the period in which this story is set). It came from North Africa via trade routes to Spain in the eleventh century, and there’s a very nice drawing of a more pear-shaped variant included in the Catalan Psalter, c. 1050. There’s also a version of a rabāb in a fresco in the crypt of San Urbano alla Caffarella, near Rome (c. 1011), and that version looks almost exactly like a modern violin, including S-shaped soundholes. The tones of the rabāb are said, even in early accounts, to mimic those of a woman’s voice.

• • • •

Bitter oranges, a primary crop in Málaga, have recently been discovered to have effects similar to those of the banned diet-aid ephedra—their extract, often marketed as a stimulant, can cause strokes and heart attacks. The pale yellow wood of the bitter orange tree is so hard that it is made into baseball bats in Cuba. The golem’s golem, composed of ash and a name written on parchment, is a far more traditional golem than the wood and hinges creation said to have been made by ibn Gabirol (the only golem of that composition in the history, so far as I can tell), but that one is my invention.

• • • •

Qasmūna (or Kasmunah) Bat Isma’il was an eleventh- or twelfth-century Andalusian Jewish poet. Her name is likely derived from the Arabic diminutive of the Hebrew root qsm, meaning charming and seductive. Charming, in this case in the literal sense—magical. It may also be derived from the Arabic male name Qasmun—someone with a beautiful face. Her two extant poems (my loose translations from the original Arabic) are in the text. She is one of only two documented Spanish Jewish female poets in the period, the other being the Wife of Dunash. Qasmūna Bat Isma’il’s biography is unknown, though there has been plenty of speculation—the daughter of a scholar, the daughter of a well-known poet, or, in this case, something else entirely. Regardless, her poems are erotic, and steeped in the natural world.

©2017 by Maria Dahvana Headley. Originally published in The Weight of Words, edited by Dave McKean and William Schafer. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Maria Dahvana Headley is the author of the young adult sky ship fantasy Magonia, from HarperCollins, the novel Queen of Kings, the internationally bestselling memoir The Year of Yes, and The End of the Sentence, a novella co-written with Kat Howard, from Subterranean. With Neil Gaiman, she’s The New York Times-bestselling co-editor of the anthology Unnatural Creatures. Her short fiction has been nominated for the Nebula, World Fantasy, and Shirley Jackson awards, and has appeared at Uncanny Magazine, Tor.com, Lightspeed, Nightmare, Clarkesworld, Shimmer, Apex, Subterranean Online, and many more. It’s anthologized in Glitter & Mayhem, The Lowest Heaven, The Book of the Dead, twice in The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, The Year’s Best Weird Fiction, and three times in Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. Her latest novel is The Mere Wife, a contemporary retelling of Beowulf.

Answering the Questions You Might Have About the Kharbat

Adam-Troy Castro | 1640 words

You have just been attacked by a Kharbat. It has sprung on you from hiding, in some place where you foolishly imagined yourself safe; and even as its many glittering fangs sink deep into the flesh and bone of your shoulder, you know that any attempt to save yourself is futile, that you were always fated to perish in this way, and this beast was always fated to usher you screaming into the world of the dead.

What is a Kharbat?

I don’t know.

Why am I asking you?

I am the world’s leading expert.

How can you be an expert and still know nothing?

I didn’t say that experts on this monstrous species were exactly thick on the ground. I know a few small things, the answers to basic questions, the sort of thing you might be wondering about as you struggle in vain to defend yourself.

Like what?

Well, to start with, the Kharbat is not a species, not in the plural sense. It is a unique creature, alone in all the universe, and it’s just your bad luck that you happened to run into the one, here in this dark place, so far from any centers of civilization, and certainly from anyone who can hear your anguished screaming. But that’s the kind of environment it likes, when it exists.

“When it Exists”?

Well, you see, you just stumbled upon the defense mechanism, and most dangerous weapon, of the Kharbat. It is a creature of probability that can hide better than any living thing ever has, because up until the very moment when you felt its claws rip into your upper arm, it didn’t exist. There was no Kharbat, anywhere in this universe or any other; and there never has been a Kharbat, in this universe or any other. No Kharbat has ever been catalogued; no catalogue has ever been imagined. It was, in fact, impossible to conceive, even in a nightmare; the instant anybody came close to positing anything like it, it moved farther away, by becoming even stranger, and therefore outside all known referents, as well as any known hypotheticals that could be accessed by those referents. It was a non-thing. Until you were in the right position to be attacked by it, and even then it wasn’t real until it drew blood.

That’s ridiculous.

Well, yeah. But look. That’s precisely what makes the Kharbat so dangerous. Humanity has already been aware that it might encounter monsters unprecedented in its experience, and has therefore always devoted part of its intellectual energy to concocting such creatures out of smoke and shadows, as hypotheticals, to test its response. Of course, the more limited the conceptual building blocks, the more likely it always was, that the hypotheticals would be composed of bits and pieces already encountered, like the woman (ingredient #1), with the head of snakes (ingredient #2), whose gaze could turn you into stone (ingredient #3). None of these things represented an impossible leap for someone who lived in ancient Greece, and even today, many of the hypotheticals being groped for by the imaginations of mankind aren’t gigantic leaps either. The Giant Gorilla and The Giant Lizard in particular are just extrapolations from observable reality, only bigger, and The Giant Octopus-Headed Man is only that plus a little genetic tinkering.

So?

So: Anybody who conceives such a hypothetical is performing a function important to the survival of your species when that inevitably leads to speculation about how such a creature can be stopped. Create a vampire? Well, it’s an unlikely beast, but you can always try a stake through its heart. Create a hulking artificial man constructed of the corpses of the dead? Well, for God’s sake don’t antagonize it. Create a zombie? Shit, what can’t you do? Bare minimum, you can chop off its head, but after that, there’s any number of more creative ways to dispatch their sort, and for over fifty years now the human race has been excessively invested in positing them. It’s the same function that our most distant ancestors were serving when they sat around their campfires and wondered just what they would do if they ever ran into a creature stranger, and more dangerous, than the irritable bear who ate Uncle Clem. That function, imagination, is one of humanity’s greatest evolutionary advantages, and I assure you: it has saved lives.

Can it save mine?

No.

Why the hell not?

Because that, again, was the primary weapon of the Kharbat. It was just outside the human capacity to conceive of it, and therefore outside of humanity’s capacity to concoct a counter-measure. Further, as something that didn’t exist, it was also impossible to observe, and so it remained not only outside the realm of the hypothetical but also outside the realm of the possible-to-learn about. Never in your life before this point did you ever, or would you ever, be within beer range of some guy with hideous facial scars, like the ones this Kharbat just gave you right now, who could say, “Oh, these? Well, therein lies a tale.” And therefore provide you with the chief advantage of every horror story idiot who ever wandered into a forbidden place in search of a fabled monster: to wit, advance word.

Okay. I think I get what you’re saying. But I’m being attacked by the Kharbat now.

Yes.

If I survive—

You won’t.

But if I did—

You won’t.

But if I DID, just for the sake of argument, wouldn’t that blow the whole deal? If I somehow managed to stab it in the right internal organ and stumble back to civilization and tell the world about what I just endured, wouldn’t that blow the one thing the Kharbat has going for itself?

I see where you’re going with this. You’re picturing an angry mob with torches and pitchforks, hunting the beast down, and finally cornering it in a trap it cannot escape. This has been known to happen to other predatory menaces. But again, the Kharbat only exists while it’s mauling you. If you somehow pulled off a miracle and threw it off, it would cease to exist, would cease to be even hypothetical, and would not be anywhere on your plane to be found. Even if you staggered back to some candle-lit tavern and told everybody about the unimaginable creature whose assault you’d just improbably survived, and even if you related your story so persuasively that everybody followed you back here and found the signs of a titanic struggle, and even if nobody posited that you might have misidentified some more mundane creature like a mountain lion, and even if the story stuck and the Kharbat became the legend that mothers warned their children about, forevermore, it would be last anybody would ever see of the Kharbat, but not the last of the problem, because all you will have accomplished is move the boundaries of the human imagination farther away from their current positions, and therefore create a perfect habitat for whatever being comes after the Kharbat, something just a little stranger than the Kharbat, which could itself lurk in nonexistence and attack some other poor bastard whose world had never conceived it. A Kharbat Plus One, if you will. Or rather, since it will look and act nothing like a Kharbat or anything else anybody has ever seen or imagined, some other made-up word: a Griskarg, or something like that.

What would that be like?

I don’t know. And you’re too busy being eaten by the Kharbat to worry about such possibilities.

It seems to be lingering over my leg. Tell me anyway.

By its very nature, it’s nothing you could describe, or comprehend. Any creature who replaced the Kharbat—and someday, one will replace the Kharbat—will be some other poor bastard’s problem.

Okay, so what if it the Kharbat kills me, as now appears increasingly likely? If it only exists while it’s mauling me, what happens afterward? Does it shamble closer to town and start eating other people?

No, it doesn’t. Again, the chief evolutionary advantage of the Kharbat is that it does not exist. Once it has manifested in its assault on you, it has created proof that it exists and has therefore doomed itself to a painful end. Like the bee that dies from its sting, the Kharbat perishes the first time it strikes. At the moment there is nothing left of your mortal form, the Kharbat is poisoned by the agony of corporeality and itself vanishes, as it must. It does not return to its point of origin, because that is no place at all and cannot be accessed. It instead goes nowhere, a subtle distinction that could fill many quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore and was indeed what the narrator of Edgar Allan Poe’s classic poem “The Raven” was trying to puzzle out before being harassed by that talkative bird. Never mind him; it’s more than I have time to go into, and more than you have time to hear. Suffice it to say that you are the only prey the Kharbat will ever know. It’s an honor, really. Like meeting a celebrity. And then, at some point in the future, some other lone traveler will be happening along some other isolated place, and meet whatever incomprehensible, unimaginable monster comes after it.

So this is, what are you telling me? Some part of the natural circle of life?

See? It’s not so hard to understand. This has been happening all along. You can’t feel all that persecuted. You’re just the latest schmuck this happened to.

It does hurt, though.

Yes, I imagine it would. It doesn’t look fun at all.

That’s no consolation.

I know. I can honestly hardly imagine.

©2021 by Adam-Troy Castro.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Adam-Troy Castro made his first non-fiction sale to Spy magazine in 1987. His twenty-six books to date include four Spider-Man novels, three novels about his profoundly damaged far-future murder investigator Andrea Cort, and six middle-grade novels about the dimension-spanning adventures of young Gustav Gloom. Adam’s works have won the Philip K. Dick Award and the Seiun (Japan), and have been nominated for eight Nebulas, three Stokers, two Hugos, one World Fantasy Award, and, internationally, the Ignotus (Spain), the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire (France), and the Kurd-Laßwitz Preis (Germany). His latest release was the audio collection My Wife Hates Time Travel And Other Stories (Skyboat Media), which features thirteen hours of his fiction, including the new stories “The Hour In Between” and “Big Stupe and the Buried Big Glowing Booger.” Adam lives in Florida with his wife Judi and a trio of chaotic paladin cats.

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

The Mushroom Queen

Liz Ziemska | 5436 words

It’s the middle of the night and the woman can’t sleep. Perhaps it’s the full moon, or the fool moon, the kind of moon that keeps you awake thinking stupid thoughts. She puts on her glasses and sees that it’s 2:55 a.m. The man lies beside her generating too much heat. There’s a small brown dog nestled into her armpit. A white dog sleeps at her feet. She’s wedged in between them like a crooked tooth.

For about an hour now she’s been thinking about the two races of man. One race is very, very slow; they crawl upon the earth like slugs, leaving silvery slime trails wherever they go. The other race is very, very fast, about as fast as electrons, and when they pass by, they leave a radiant residue. Though you can never be sure if you’ve actually seen them, or if there’s a smudge on your glasses picking up the light in a funny way. The two races live side by side, completely unaware of one another, sucking on the same earth.

But on the night of the fool moon, a special moon that occurs once per decade—or every 9.3 years to be exact—when the moonrise lag is equal to the moonset lag, causing great upheavals of the deep, cold waters of the Pacific Ocean, the slow race can sometimes catch up to the fast race. All of this is just nonsense, of course. It’s the duration that’s the important part here. Nine-point-three years is a long time to be married.

The woman sighs and digs her toes into the fur of the white dog. She looks out the sliding glass door at the garden in moonlight—they still don’t have curtains. It really is beautiful out there, like a scene from Last Year at Marienbad, her favorite film, but enacted with owls, rabbits, voles, and coyotes. A tiny, mournful cry reaches her through the partially opened door, some small furred thing losing its life out beyond the chicken-wire fence and the scrub grass, where the man keeps the piles of lumber that once was the trellis under which they were married.

A bit of white flashes by in her peripheral vision—a flap of cloth?—then disappears behind the farthest clump of jade plant.

Kicking off the blankets, the woman rolls carefully from the bed so as not to disturb the dogs and man. She shakes a sweater from the pile the man left on the floor, where the jeans and underwear he shucked off still retain his shape, as if his body had dematerialized. She walks to the door and looks out. It’s the one thing they had agreed on, a luxury but well worth it: the lawn, the decorative clumps of shrubbery, the thin, drooping leaves of the Mexican bamboo, the shooting spears of flax. And then she sees it again, diving behind the nearest jade plant. Coming closer to the house where the dogs and man lie paralyzed in sleep.

The woman slides the glass door open wider and steps out onto the deck, closing it behind her so the dogs won’t get out. She stands there for a moment to let the moonlight rain down on her. It has a definite tone, like tiny silver shavings striking glass, a tone that shifts as the silver bounces off her head, her shoulders, her upturned face. The moon is past its highest point; she can feel her energy ebbing. She thinks again about the two races of man. What if the fast race can sometimes clean up the messes of the slow?

What is wrong with her marriage anyway? Nothing that can be pointed to, no crimes, no infidelities. Some petty cruelties in times of stress, but who isn’t guilty of that? Nevertheless, she feels restless, bored, slow. There’s nothing wrong, but everything’s wrong: she’d like that on a t-shirt, please.

For months now she’s been fantasizing about being more than she is. What if she could step into the fast, fast world without being missed? What she wants now, more than anything, is a placeholder, someone to keep her life intact while she goes on a little reconnaissance trip.

Her toes grip the redwood boards and she steps out onto the lawn.

Just as she reaches the jade plant, another woman steps out to face her. They are nearly identical, mirror images, though the doppelgänger, as benefits a creature of the moonlight, is more glamorous-looking than her sun-fattened twin. Even so, to examine herself three-dimensionally is unnerving for the woman. Mirrors don’t tell half the story. Is that really what her nose looks like in profile? The skin of the other is beaded with tiny water droplets, her white cotton nightgown translucent with moisture. The woman reaches out to touch her, but just as she’s about to make contact, the other one grabs her by the throat and tosses her into the jade plant. Our woman is gone.

Her double crosses the lawn, steps onto the deck, slides open the door, dries her feet on the pile of discarded clothes, and climbs into bed.

• • • •

The white dog lifts his head and wags his tail. Then he stops, sits up, and looks again. He’s confused. His eyes tell him one thing, but his nose, the more reliable source, tells him another: She may look like his beloved mistress, but she smells, definitively, like rabbits. There’s nothing the dog loves more than killing rabbits.

He wags his tail again. The woman sleeps. Maybe his nose is wrong. He’s getting old, almost six, though not very old for his breed. He has another six years in him, he can feel it, but things are starting to break down. He can’t bank the curves like he used to while chasing the neighbor’s cat off the lawn. Thank God the mangy creature was taken out by coyotes (tracked, tricked, cornered, and devoured—he had heard it all one night). Thank God he didn’t have to suffer the humiliation of another failed chase, the cat’s mocking glance as it jumped onto the fence and disappeared into the street, where the dog could not go without a leash.

The woman digs her toes into his fur, like the other one had done. She turns onto her side, pulls the blanket up to her chin, tucks the brown dog, that small, furry shithead, into the curve of her body, like the other woman had always done. Everything checks out, except for the strange straw-and-dandelion smell of rabbits. Perhaps, like his hips, his nose is starting to go.

• • • •

Our woman, the original, sinks into the soft, moist ground at the base of the jade plant, terrified. She tries to scream, but soil fills her mouth. She opens her eyes, but there is nothing but darkness. No air, no sound, the world is extinguished. And yet she lives on, packed in with the weight of the earth; no longer merely slow, she is immobile.

• • • •

The small dog knows of course that the creature in bed with him is not his beloved mistress, but he also realizes that it would be dangerous to let on that he knows. This “woman” is so much a copy of his woman that it obviously took a great deal of effort to pull off the stunt, and great effort usually comes with great desire. The small dog knows there’s nothing more dangerous in the world than desire. He also knows that to raise an alarm about this fake would be to risk the life of his true mistress, who is obviously being held captive somewhere.

What he needs to do now is to convince this dimwitted white brute to stop sniffing her like she’s some kind of rabbit he’d like to snatch up in his teeth and shake to death. That stupid white fluff likes to leave his rabbit carcasses all over the lawn, those pretty little brownish gray rabbits that come to feed on the garden and leave their delicious pellets behind for the small dog to find and eat. That’s what the dumb white leg-humper is missing: This fake woman doesn’t smell like rabbits; she smells like rabbit poo.

• • • •

Some fun facts about fungus, the most prevalent organism on the planet.

About 250 million years ago, a meteorite struck down around Siberia, creating tidal waves, lava flows, hot gases, and searing winds. The land grew dark under a cloud of debris, causing ninety percent of its species to die out. Fungus inherited the earth.

Animals are more closely related to fungi than to any other kingdom. Millions of years ago, we shared a common ancestor. Man is just a branch off the fungal evolutionary tree, the branch that evolved the ability to capture nutrients by surrounding its food with cellular sacs, or stomachs. As animals emerged from the water, they developed a dense layer of cells to prevent the loss of moisture. Fungi, on the other hand, solved the problem of moisture retention by going underground.

Mycelium, a web-like mass of tiny branching threads containing one or more fungal cells surrounded by a tubular wall, is the vegetative part of fungus. It’s the stuff that grows and spreads out through every cubic center of soil in the world. Every time you step on a soccer field, a forest, a suburban lawn, you walk upon thousands of sentient cells that communicate with one another using chemical messengers. Mycelium helps heal and steer the ecosystem, recycling waste into soil. Constantly moving, mycelium can travel several inches a day. There have been experiments conducted in Japan that show slime mold successfully navigating a food maze, choosing the shortest distance between two points, disregarding dead ends.

Mushrooms are the fruiting bodies, the reproductive organs, of mycelium. They feed on rotting things, like rabbit poo, and troubled relationships.

• • • •

The Mushroom Queen was tired of living underground. She can assume any form. Her skin is nicer than human skin. Firm and white, it has no pores, only spores, because mushrooms are self-propagating, which can get pretty lonely. So, she deposed herself and came to the woman’s house from the east, traveling west along the shore of a wide green river, over the Appalachians, beneath the Great Lakes, flowing across the midwestern plains. She was born over a century ago in the unkempt garden of a red-brick house that was once a home, then a nursery, then a nunnery, and is now again a home.

That is where our woman arrives now, sucked across the country and extruded from the ground beneath a trellis of tangled vines that sprout purple flowers in the summer. They have switched places, our woman and the Mushroom Queen, the discontent of one calling to the desire of the other. Nature abhors a vacuum.

• • • •

The man thinks this woman is an improvement over the other. Not that he knows there’s been a switch, only a sudden unexplainable change in personality. He doesn’t question it, as he’s unaccustomed to questioning good fortune when it rains down on his head. This woman is more pliable than the other, more eager. The other one never wanted to make love in the morning. And as he sinks his fingers into her flesh and buries his face in her dark curls, he falls in love with her all over again.

The Mushroom Queen has gills behind her ears, but the man does not notice. He delights in her damp, earthy scent, her luminous whiteness, the way her body forms around his. She opens her mouth to laugh at his jokes, but no sound comes out. Already the walls of the bedroom are covered in green slime.

• • • •

At breakfast, the man makes “the usual”: boiled eggs, toast, a wedge of Brie, apricot jam, and good strong oolong tea. The Mushroom Queen sniffs the Brie with its waxy casing of Penicillium camemberti. It wouldn’t do to eat a distant cousin, so she pushes it aside. “You love Brie,” says the man. The Mushroom Queen shrugs. “Maybe you’re pregnant.” A grin spreads across his face. She laughs her soundless laugh. If the Mushroom Queen wanted to propagate, all she would have to do is point a finger and a mushroom would bud out of its tip. She pushes her egg away, too fresh. “What can I get you instead?” says the man.

The contents of the compost bin would be nice, thinks the Mushroom Queen. She would like to take the bin to the guest room, where it is dark and damp, spread it out on the duvet, and roll around in the coffee grounds, potato peels, and carrot tops, but that wouldn’t be good for their relationship.

This is her first time imitating human form, and the Mushroom Queen is not very good at it. One breast has come out larger than the other. She forgot to grow earlobes—what will she do with all those earrings the other woman owned? Her hair moves by itself, as if stirred by a celestial wind. Unlike human hair, which is just dead keratin, the hair of the Mushroom Queen is mycelium embedded with charcoal. Speech is difficult, though not impossible. Moving air through a mushroom is no problem, just look at the spore dispersal of the Calvatia gigantea, the giant puffball. Tone modulation is difficult for her, lacking a muscular diaphragm. Much easier to nod and smile; the man does all the talking anyway.

The Mushroom Queen bathes in the normal way when the man wants to take a bath with her, but she doesn’t feel fully clean in water. While he’s napping, she goes out into the garden and tears open a bag of premium potting soil, rubs herself down in the shade of the tree ferns.

• • • •

Our woman’s body is pressed down through a root sieve, releasing the hundred trillion cells of her symbiotic microbiome into the soil. They wriggle away in search of a new host. What’s left of her—the approximately 37.2 trillion cells that had once been organized into brain, liver, eyeballs, bellybutton—are absorbed by the tube-like hyphae of the North American mycelium web and fanned out across the garden. In her newly dematerialized state, she is simultaneously nowhere and everywhere. But this is just an illusion, temporary vertigo brought on by her sudden vastness. In reality, she covers a little less than three square acres, one edge dangling in the cool green waters of the Hudson, the other pushing up against the crumbling blacktop of Route 9. There’s a maple tree growing out of her forehead, its flame-colored leaves the color of panic.

• • • •

Days pass. At night, the mist rises from the Pacific, rolls up the cliff, and settles around the house, muffling it from the neighboring houses. One morning the dogs find the lawn covered with mushrooms. The woman used to come out with the weed puller and scoop out each fungus by the root, afraid the dogs would eat them. Her people had been mushroom foragers in the old country, but she’d lost the knack of sorting edible from poisonous.

The dogs sniff the ground beneath the nearest jade plant. There’s something lingering among the watery stems of the succulents, a sad, familiar scent of laundry detergent and lemon verbena hand lotion.

• • • •

What does the Mushroom Queen wind up eating? Fermented things, like pickles, soy sauce drunk directly from the bottle, kimchi, forgotten packages of ham gone slippery with pink goo, old strawberries melting into their green plastic basket, glued together by a whitish fur. She hides eggs under the quilt in the guest room until they rot, sucks out the yolks, chews on the shells to clean her “teeth.” She drinks beer, endless bottles of beer, though the man is surprised. The other woman never touched alcohol; “empty calories,” she called it. But the Mushroom Queen never gains weight, only biomass.

How does the Mushroom Queen feel about the dogs? They’re competitors for the rabbit pellets, and they don’t give anything back, their own waste too rich in erythrocytes from the meat they eat to grow mushrooms. They’re suspicious of her, particularly the little one. It’s a good thing they can’t speak. The man ignores them. It was the woman’s job to feed them. Their leashes hang limply from the doorknob. The Mushroom Queen can’t risk walking them, can’t expose herself to the neighbors, not knowing how to address them. Besotted with the myth of personhood, humans have names. Mushrooms have no such cult of personality. All is mycelium; mycelium is all.

• • • •

It takes a great deal of concentration to concentrate the self, but nothing banishes lethargy like a well-defined villain. At five cell layers thick instead of one, our woman has condensed herself from three acres down to the size of the lawn in her own backyard. But she’s still flat and thin enough to move through the soil without snagging parts of herself on telephone poles and sewage pipes. She’s heading west against the earth’s rotation, gliding through the rich dark loam of the Hudson River Valley as easily as a manta ray swimming through the Sea of Cortez.

She’s heading home, never mind that home is the place from which she had recently dreamed of escaping.

• • • •

The small dog leads the white dog on a tour of the woman’s closet. They check the shoes, but nothing is missing, not even the pale blue sneakers she wore when she walked them around the block—the only time she left the house. The man left the house almost every morning, coming back hours later smelling of coffee, cigarettes, and something altogether different.

The woman had taken them on endless loops around the neighborhood, making sure to pass the parking lot where tourists stop to gawk at the cliffs above the ocean. They always fawned over the dogs, and, by extension, the woman. She needed it, that daily dose. The man used to admire her, long ago, back when the dogs were just pups.

The man is such a messy eater. The small dog likes to snuffle under his chair, looking for crumbs. Occasionally, he’ll get up on his hind legs and peer at the screen he’s peering into, try to make sense of the sinuous writhing shapes he finds there. Then the woman walks into the room and the image instantly changes to black ants marching across a plain white ground.

• • • •

Born into darkness, the Mushroom Queen cannot sleep. At night she wanders the house picking up objects at random, trying to guess their purpose. There are wedding photographs on the piano, the man and the woman surrounded by smiling friends, children playing musical instruments. The man is ducking under colorful streamers of a maypole. The bride looks happy in her butterfly-embroidered dress. Will she try to find her way back from the garden on the shores of the Hudson? What will happen if she does? Which one will the man choose?

The Mushroom Queen wants to experience love, that’s why she came here in the first place, but she always wants to be known. She has learned about the distinction from the books in the basement of the red-brick house. Seeping into soggy cardboard boxes, she consumed page after page of Romeo and Juliet, Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, Gone with the Wind, and realized that to be loved is not the same as to be known. For instance, Karenin loved his wife, Anna, in his own way, but he did not know her. How is the Mushroom Queen going to get the man to see her clearly, to fall in love with her without the use of deception?

There are so many things she can do: Pleurotus ostreatus, the oyster mushroom, to unclog his arteries; Lentinula edodes, the shiitake, with its powerful anti-cancer, anti-viral, and anti-herpes polysaccharides; Ganoderma lucidum, the reishi mushroom, for longevity and sexual prowess. Then there are the Death Caps and the Amanita ocreata, the Destroying Angel—so like the common button mushroom, except for the foreskin-like veil connecting its egg-shaped cap with its chubby stem. That and its liver-dissolving qualities. The Mushroom Queen loves all these mushrooms, but to win the man’s affection, she’ll do it the hard way, using nothing but the clumsy human heart. Or its fungal facsimile.

• • • •

The small dog is angry with the white dog. More than once he’s come upon him in the hallway, the big white idiot, lying on his back, paws in the air, tongue lolling out of his mouth, writhing with ecstasy under the fingers of the Mushroom Queen as she scratches his belly. Disgusting.

The small dog follows the imposter as the man leads her onto the lawn, to the hidden bower where he and the real woman used to make love in the afternoon. He watches them from behind the acacia tree, sees the Mushroom Queen arch her neck, roll her eyes back until only the whites are visible, spread her mushroom-brown lips in a silent yawl of pleasure. His woman never abandoned herself in this way.

• • • •

Our woman trails the rains as they sweep across the continent. By early August, she’s made it all the way to the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains. She climbs the foothills, the land rising and falling, rising and falling, like a roller coaster. At five thousand feet, she reaches a broad, high meadow sheltered from the winds by an aspen grove. She weaves in through the orange paintbrush and chamomile, the primrose, fireweed, and horsemint. The air is cool and thin, the soil moist and rich. It would be lovely to settle down in this place, but vengeance keeps her moving. A jagged wall of granite rises above her, a hundred times more daunting than the Appalachians. Up ahead is the timberline, where there are no trees, no soil, and very little water. She can’t cross that line, can’t go up and over the mountains, but she can go through. She can release polysaccharides, glycoproteins, chelating enzymes, and acids to dissolve the rock, creating micro cavities in the granite, but that would take too long. Time is running out—she can feel it in the very tips of her hyphae. She hunkers down among the lupines, pushing up mushrooms as she contemplates her next move.

• • • •

The Mushroom Queen’s attention is beginning to wander. There’s a hollow spot under the floorboards near the bookshelf where the termites have set up a colony. There are nightly rat revels in the crawlspace above the bed. The garage roof sinks in the middle like a swaybacked horse. Pine roots have buckled the concrete driveway. Silverfish scuttle among the cutlery.

The house is calling to her and she has no choice but to respond. After all, she is a saprophyte, a primary decomposer of twigs, grass, stumps, logs, and other dead things. It’s what she does; it’s nothing personal. Besides, human love tasted so much better on the page. Already her hyphae are slipping in between the man’s cells, prying them apart.

Soon she will dissolve him.

The dogs are next. For now, their abundant fur has kept them safe, that and their reflexes. The Mushroom Queen has stopped feeding them, hoping to slow them down. They are starving, growing weaker by the day. How much longer can they dodge her sticky threads?

• • • •

Unloved, unbrushed, his belly empty, the small dog fills his days with happy memories. Like laundry day, when the woman used to dump the fresh load onto the bed and drop him into the heap so he could root and dig and roll around in the warm fragrant cloth. No one does laundry now that the woman is gone. The dishes are piled in the sink; the floor, unswept. Without the woman’s constant ministrations, the walls themselves are caving in.

• • • •

Back at the timberline, beetles arrive in clicking clouds and land on the woman’s mushroom caps. They burrow deeply into her soft pink flesh, mandibles gnawing into her spore-rich underlayer. How good it feels to be cleaned out like this!

A rainstorm sweeps through and the beetles are picked up by the wind. They’re carried up and over the mountain, legs and wings covered in spores. They settle down near Grand Junction, Colorado, and scuttle away into the fields. The spores sink into the mulch and germinate a fresh new webbing of mycelium.

Reborn, the woman waits to see how much more of her will make the crossing. By early September, she’s half her size, but twice as determined. Hugging the Colorado River all the way to the California border, our woman enters the Imperial Valley. Shimmying along irrigation canals, spawning under fields of cantaloupes and cabbages, sucking up life-giving nitrogen, she fans out into San Bernardino County. From there she hops lawns all the way to Point Dume.

• • • •

Sensing her rival’s approach, the Mushroom Queen establishes a mycelial perimeter from the Pacific Coast Highway to the very edge of the cliff above the ocean. She puts on galoshes, rubber gloves, steps into a couple of trash bags, making sure to tape the plastic securely around her wrists and ankles. Then she seals her head and neck with several yards of cling wrap. Fully protected, she goes into the kitchen to whip up a batch of poison. The house, the man, the dogs: they all belong to her now, and she’s not willing to share them.

• • • •

Giddy, triumphant, our woman breaks through the cracked terracotta patio and surges under the grass. She follows the lawn mower as the man, recklessly barefoot, paces out wide, even rows. The Mushroom Queen walks behind him in her battle gear wielding a power sprayer.

Our woman can taste the individual ingredients: olive oil, baking soda, apple cider vinegar. Such wholesome things, how often had she used them herself? But now they were dissolving her. She sinks down through the sod and the trucked-in dirt, past the chicken-wire gopher barrier, and finally settles into the sand and clay that are the true soils of this land. A fleeting thought crosses her mind: Without the artificial lawn, the fertilizer, the monumental water bills—all things that she and her husband had fussed over—the Mushroom Queen could never have gained a foothold in their lives. Nothing grows in clay and sand, not even fungus.

Clinging to the underside of the mulch layer, the woman crawls all the way to the back of the property and takes shelter in the shade of the disassembled trellis. She tries to will herself back into human shape, but it’s no good. She lacks the skill, and furthermore, she can no longer remember what she looked like.

The Mushroom Queen, as she can see despite the many layers of Saran Wrap and Hefty Cinch Sak, doesn’t look very human anymore. Her forehead bulges from the pressure of her cap. She’s thickened in the middle, grown cylindrical, stem-like, but love is blind.

How can our woman fight the Mushroom Queen if she can’t traverse the poisoned lawn? Perhaps she could enlist the aid of some parasitic bacteria, but that might harm the dogs. And the man. Furthermore, she’s never been the kind of person to press her case out of stubbornness until everything around her lies in ruins.

And then she remembers something she heard as she was driven from the lawn, something whispered to her by the Onychomycosis fungus growing on the third toe of the man’s left foot: The man knows there’s been a switch.

He knows and he does not miss her at all.

The fight goes out of her completely. She shrinks a little bit further into herself, the sand and clay sucking precious fluids from her mycelium. If she stays here a moment longer, she’ll have to wait until the spring rains to make her escape. Where will she go? Back to the alpine meadow with its primrose and chamomile? Back to the garden behind the red-brick house with its rich alluvial soil? What had once been a prison now seems like Elysium.

Truthfully, she doesn’t blame the man; he owes her nothing. Wishing to escape is the same as escaping. Her vanity is bruised, but everything in nature is as it should be. What is a wedding trellis after all but a basket made of loosely bound twigs through which the things you gather may fall out along the way?

And furthermore, our woman does not miss her human form. What a relief it is to escape that tired paradigm of head-torso-limbs, so much more trouble than it’s worth. She likes her new spread-out state. As her very own magic carpet, she can go anywhere.

She had longed to join the fast race, but now instead she’s joined the eternal race: fungus will survive the destruction of the environment, the melting of the polar ice caps, the rising of the waters. Fungus will survive every apocalypse until the Earth falls into the sun, and maybe even after. She’s gotten what she wanted. Well, almost.

She does not blame the white dog for betraying her with the Mushroom Queen. After all, he’s just a dog, uncomplicated, happy-go-lucky. Like the man, a love pig. But the small dog is different. She’s always suspected that he’s not a dog at all, but a demoted human soul sent back in a fur suit to atone for his sins. The small dog can be made to understand.

She has a plan, but it’s risky, given her limited skills as a relatively new fungus. Her mycelium is pluripotent—it can create any type of mushroom—but she lacks control. Some of the beetles that came to her rescue in Colorado didn’t make it over the mountain; they died writhing in the meadow. She had poisoned them. But what are her choices? For now, the Mushroom Queen is distracted by the man, but eventually she’ll turn the dogs into soil.

At least if our woman can transform them, just as she had been transformed, digest their extracellular matrix, carefully separate their cells and braid them into her mycelium, they can all be together again.

• • • •

The jade plant, a desert species, does not waste energy on growing an extensive root system. Its roots are shallow and wide and spread out from the trunk horizontally mere inches below the surface in order to capture every drop of rain. These shallow roots act as a protective umbrella for the creatures that live below—an entire family of alligator lizards, several voles, and a bonded pair of carpenter bees. The male bee is black and shiny, about the size of a Kalamata olive. When he takes to the air, his wings make the sound of a miniature chainsaw. The female looks even bigger than her mate because of the pollen-dusted hairs covering her golden body. Wherever she flies, she leaves behind the scent of flowers—no wonder the male can’t resist her.

Under the jade plant where she first entered the soil, among the lizards, voles, and bees, our woman spins out fresh strands of mycelium and begins weaving a mat, a raft. A lure.

• • • •

The small dog walks over to the nearest clump of jade plant. Shaky from hunger, he lifts his leg against the plump green leaves. That’s when he sees them: three little mushrooms forcing their way through the soil at the base of the plant. They’re pink and tender with snug-fitting egg-shaped caps arranged in an arc, like the outspread tips of a woman’s fingers. Those familiar pink fingers that used to offer little bits of cheese, then reach for the tuft of fur at the top of his head and scratch and scratch until he couldn’t take it anymore. He can picture his mistress standing on tiptoe somewhere underground, reaching and reaching for the surface, only her fingertips breaking through into the mist-dampened air.

He starts digging frantically, trying to get her out before she suffocates. Soil flies all around him, clinging to his paws, his whiskers, his russet fur, but there are no fingers beneath the tips. No outstretched hand. No woman. Just mushrooms.

He sighs a deep, shuddering doggy’s sigh. She’s never coming back, his beloved mistress; he’ll never see her again. No one misses her but him. Despondent, he opens his small, sharp-fanged mouth and eats the mushrooms, one by one, until there’s nothing left but a dug-out scar in the earth at the base of the jade plant.

©2015 by Liz Ziemska. Originally published in Tin House. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Liz Ziemska is a graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her fiction has appeared in such places as Tin House, Strange Horizons, Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, and Tordotcom, among others. She has been awarded the Pushcart Prize, nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award, and received Honorable Mention for the Katherine Anne Porter Prize.

Frost’s Boy

P H Lee | 7961 words

I have heard it on the rumors that when the tale-spinner’s guild gathers in their secret places, a full half of them are sworn to never tell the truth, and the other half to never tell a lie, even if it mean their life. Being one of that trade myself, I can tell you that that’s more or less the shape of it, and I tell you so that you will know that this tale is true, just as it happened and just as it was told to, for I am one of the ones sworn to the truth.

The name I’m called is Dusty Boots, I come from the valley of Erwhile, and I am in love with a girl that I can never have. The story I tell you now happened right near to us, in a place no more than a walk away, although where exactly I cannot say, for the village where it happened is many years lost to frost and forest and no one alive today quite knows exactly where it stood.

Once upon a time, in that place right near to us, there lived a man and a woman, together as man and wife, though, like most peasants, no one had married them nor given them any word. It was simply that their love for each other was stronger even than their poverty. Not that there are wealthy men in these lands—how could there be wealthy men where winter sleeps an inch below the earth?—but this man and this woman had so few stores that it was only their love for each other that kept them warm through the long dark. And so, of course, the woman became pregnant.

As poor as they were, her pregnancy was merely a cause for more sorrow. How could they possibly keep a child, when they could scarcely keep themselves?

Still, somehow, they managed to scrape by three seasons, and the man was strong and the woman was stronger, and she birthed to him a son, healthy and so beautiful that to look upon him was to love him, and in that moment in both their hearts they knew that they could not give him up for dead. But the heart’s will and the world’s will are often apart, and as time wore on a year, it was plain that they could not keep the boy. So, in the dark of the night one year after their son was born, the man awoke in the middle of the night and, slipping away from his sleeping wife, he took their only child, that beautiful boy one year old, and stole him out into the forest to do what had to be done.

He had intended to smash his son’s head with a rock, to spare him the pain of the cold, but, as he laid the sleeping child down in the nook of a tree, he looked on his beautiful face and could not bring himself to do it. Instead, he kissed his son one last time, held him for a little too long, and left him to die in the hollow of an old tree. He cried as he walked back to his wife, and I am told that his tears froze on the ground where they fell. If you were foolish enough to brave the woods tonight, you might see them still.

I do not know what became of that man, or his wife, or the love between them. Perhaps their circumstances bettered, and they had many more children, although surely none as beautiful as their first. Perhaps they starved to death that very winter. Perhaps that unspoken murder sat between, festering at their love until it turned to hatred, and they never spoke again until they died. I do not know. Every story tells it differently, so how am I to know the truth?

• • • •

It is better to speak of what I do know of, for I do know what happened to that child as he lay there in the cold and the dark in the hollow of an old tree in the depths of the forest and the winter. It’s like this: As he lay there in the snow, sleeping slowly, two ravens came and perched above him.

“Ah,” said the first, “another child has been left to die in the dark! See how his eyes are innocent—think how soothing they will be. And his skin is soft—think how luscious it will be. Truly he will make a feast for us! Let’s not wait until he’s hard and frozen and dead. Damn our oaths to scavenging, let us eat him alive!”

But the second raven merely shook her head. “You can start if you like, my husband,” she said, “but look at the child! See how beautiful he is! I cannot bear to harm such beauty. I will not stop you from eating him yourself, but I must look away, or my heart will surely break.”

“No, you are right,” said the first raven after some consideration, “I cannot bear to harm him, either. Let us go and seek some less perfect carrion, then, wife, for if we do not eat in this long night then surely we shall die.”

And, with that, the ravens flew off.

Time passed, as it always does, and the night grew deeper and darker as the young boy slept where his father had abandoned him. In time, two wolves padded up through the snow and stood on either side of the child’s hollow.

“Ah,” said the first, “another child has been left to die in the dark. See how his cheeks beam so brightly—think of how succulent they will be. See how his heart beats so softly—we will each take one half of it and savor its purity. Truly he will make a feast for us! Let’s not wait another moment but leap on him and tear him limb from limb, spilling man’s red blood across the snow.”

But the second would sadly shook her head. “You can start if you like, my husband,” she said, “but look at the child! See how beautiful he is! I cannot bear to harm such beauty. I will not stop you from your dinner, but I must run away, for if I even hear a single cry from those lips, my heart will surely break.”

“No, you are right,” said the first wolf after some consideration, “I cannot bear to harm him, either. Let us go and seek some less perfect prey, then, wife, for if we do not eat in this long night then surely we shall die.”

And, with that, the wolves padded off.

Time passed, as it does, and the night grew deeper and darker and colder. Slowly, the frost crept up from its resting place an inch beneath the earth, higher and higher until it covered the roots of the trees, until it covered the edges of the bark, until it crept into the depths of the child’s body, chilling him, slowing him, turning his flesh first blue then hard. But, just as the frost was about to claim him entirely, the boy stirred in his sleep and spoke. “Dada . . .” he said, his first word, and the words were so innocent and perfect that even the frost took pause.

“Well,” said Frost to itself, “well.” It was not used to feelings, and it did not know what to make of them. “It seems I cannot bring myself to kill this boy. See how beautiful he is! No, it is decided. I cannot kill him.”

And, with that, Frost made its way off to do its other duties in the long night. But, unused to thoughts, it kept pondering the boy. “What if, in my absence, some other beast or peril were to beset the boy and kill him? What if my long-fingered mother were to find him? Then, surely, all would be lost, that beauty would be broken, just as if I killed him myself. No, there must be some other way.”

And Frost thought and thought to itself, thought as it froze through the ponds, thought as it drove through the ramshackle homes and killed those unprepared, thought as it snapped bowls and troughs that had been left in the open. And, in time, it returned to the boy and hung itself around him, staring at his sleeping beauty. “Nothing for it,” thought Frost to itself, and shook the boy’s shoulder gently until he woke.

“Boy,” said Frost, speaking in the oldest manner, so that even as a child one year old he could understand, “you cannot go back home. Your father and your mother have abandoned you to die by my hand.

“And do not think that I would not have done it, boy. I am cold and cruel and have killed a million children left to my devices. It is simply that each winter is longer, each cold more pressing, and each year my work grows greater. I will need a boy to prentice my profession, for soon there will be altogether too much work for me alone. So, boy, what say you? Come and be my apprentice, or stay and die by the thousand perils of the forest.”

Even though he was half-asleep and dreaming, the child smiled, and Frost took that as good as a yes, and carried the boy off to his home an inch beneath the earth.

• • • •

Years passed, and though Frost’s talents were not given to raising children, it brought up the boy as best it could, and taught him the trade just like he’d been Frost’s own. Each year, the boy grew up more beautiful, but each year, his heart grew colder, for he knew no warm love from no mother and no father. The only thing he loved was Frost, and the love of Frost does nothing to warm a human heart. Each winter, he helped his adopted father with the work, freezing ponds, breaking branches, waking up the storms that roll from the north to rain down their hail crack-crack against the roofs. And each winter the boy’s heart grew colder, until it was as cold as ice, then colder still.

For Frost to have a cold heart, for winter to have cold depths, for the dark to be cold as it lurks behind the sun, that is neither kind nor wicked. But Frost’s Boy, he was not like the frost, or the winter, or the dark. He was a man, or at least was a boy, and as a boy his cold heart was wicked to the core, wickeder than any man’s has ever been, almost as wicked as his long-fingered grandmother’s.

It was because his heart was wicked that his favorite work of all the winter was freezing the hearts of pretty girls. At first, he did it just as his father did, catching them unawares in the early dark, or when their parents had left a chink in their wall against frost’s siege. He would sneak in at night, kiss them right on the lips, and watch as the chills took them and their skin turned cold and hard. How he loved to watch them die by his cold! But he would not stay to hear the shrieks and cries of their mothers, as they discovered their cold, dead daughters, for there was much work to do in the winter, and he could not linger long, even for work he loved.

But, as time passed and he came to understand that he was beautiful, he began to freeze girls’ hearts with other methods. He would chase after a girl, show her his beauty, hear her confessions of love before he kissed her, froze her heart with his chill, and left her dead where she stood. He would break her heart, and freeze her tears to her face with his breath, touch her breast and freeze her heart with his fingers. He loved to freeze those pretty girls so much that he would venture out in the summer, snuck away from Frost’s rest beneath the earth, and catch them in the woods where they went to gather berries and medicines, or even as they played with each other right outside their house.

• • • •

Once, he found a girl gathering firewood, deeper in the woods than she should have been. He snuck up behind her and breathed his cold breath on her neck, and though she thought it was just the wind from the earth she turned to look and caught his gorgeous eyes. When she looked at him, and saw how beautiful he truly was—how graceful, how manly, and how cold—she gasped, dropped her firewood, and very nearly fainted.

“Do you think I am beautiful?” he asked her, a glint in his eye for he already knew the answer.

The girl, terrified and fascinated and overwhelmed, could not even speak. She simply held her hands to her breast and nodded, staring deep into his eyes. He smiled, and for all the world was twice as beautiful as he had been before. He took a step in towards her, and almost touched her.

“And do you love me?” he asked, with the same cold smile.

Her eyes widened, and tears began to form at the edge of eyes. She still did not speak, but shook her head.

He jumped back, shocked and confused. “What?!” he demanded. “Am I not the most beautiful boy that you have ever seen? How could you not love me?”

The young girl looked down, away from his eyes, and finally found her voice. “It is not that you are not beautiful,” she said, “for truly you are gorgeous, and I would have you for my lover if it were not that I know you. My gran told me about you. You are Frost’s Boy, who comes for pretty girls to freeze their hearts, and to love you is, in that same instant, to die by your cold kiss.” And, with that, she ran as swiftly as she could back towards her father’s house, which was snug and proof against the cold.

But, fast as she could run, the boy had learned his speed from Frost and wind. He caught up with her with ease and took her hand in his.

“It isn’t like that!” he lied as he looked into her eyes. “I love you! I loved you from the moment I first saw you.” And, with that, she was lost. He leaned towards his, kissed her right on the lips, and she froze plain dead.

• • • •

Another time he came across a girl in a clearing, gathering the last flowers of summer for the festivals, and came up behind her and breathed his cold breath across her neck. She jumped, looked around, saw his face, and fell in love.

“Do you think that I am beautiful?” he asked her, a glint in his eye for he already knew the answer.

The girl smiled, and threw her bundles of flowers up into the air. As petals rained down around them, she said “Yes, you are more beautiful than any of my flowers.”

He smiled, and for all the world was twice as beautiful as he had been before. He took a step in towards her, and almost touched her.

“And do you love me?” he asked, with the same cold smile.

“Yes,” she said true, “yes, I loved you from before I saw you.”

He smiled wider, and stepped in to kiss her, but she held out her arms and kept him at bay. “I do not want you to think,” she said, “that I am taken in by your ruse. I know who you are.”

He took her hands in his, and asked, “If you know who I am, why do you not flee from the sight of me, for your know that my kiss will freeze your heart.”

The girl smiled a mysterious smile. “Yes, you’re Frost’s Boy, and it’s just as my gran told it to me. But I know the rest of your story, and how you have come to be so cold. How you have grown without the warmth of a single loving human heart. I do not fear you.”

The boy was startled, but did not lose his grip on her hands. “And why is that?”

“Because I love you,” the girl declared, “I love you more than any girl has ever loved any boy ever in the world! I loved you since I first heard your sad story, and with my warm love I will melt your icy heart, ’til your heart is warm and beats from its own emotion.”

“Can you save me from Frost?” asked the boy, and truly grinned from hope. He let go her hands, and embraced her, and she embraced him. For hours, they stood like that, but though her love of him was warm and hot, and greater love than any girl has ever had for any boy, the cold in his heart was older than her, older than her grandmother who told her of him, older than the village where she lived, and her love was not endless and thick and hard like the winter that sleeps beneath the earth, and in time her skin hardened, and her heart froze, and she died just like that. He left her in that field, no warmer than he had been before, and laughed with the chill wind at her foolishness.

• • • •

Yet another time, though, he came across a girl out on a frozen pond, fishing with hook and line for a little food. He blew across the ice behind her, scattering shards, and breathed right across her neck. She turned around, gasped, and nearly dropped her line as she saw his brilliant clear eyes.

“Hello,” she said quickly, “I didn’t hear you coming.”

“Hello,” he said in return, and then, “do you think I’m beautiful?”

“Of course I do,” said the girl as she pulled in her line, though she did not look at him as she spoke. “It’s clearly plain to see that you’re the most beautiful boy that has ever walked this earth.”

He stepped in towards her and helped her wind the line. “Then do you love me?”

“Of course I do,” she said, still looking away from him. “How could I not love a boy as beautiful as you?” But as he leaned in to kiss her, she ducked away.

“No,” she said as she held him away, “not yet.”

“But why?” he said. “If you love me, why won’t you let me kiss you?”

“Well,” she said, as she stood and began to walk back across the ice, “surely as you are so beautiful, and surely you are, and surely as I do love you, and surely I do, you are surely the boy I’ve heard tell of, Frost’s Boy, whose kiss is frozen death.”

“I won’t deny,” he said, “but surely you know it’s foolish to resist me.”

“Just so!” replied the girl. “If I were to run, or try to turn away, then like the first girl you’d catch me and I’d love you just the same as if I’d never run at all. It is no good for me to run away.”

“Yes,” he said, “it’s just like that. But still you put me off. Surely it will come to nothing in the end.”

“It’s true,” she said, “and I know that, though I love you with all my heart, it will not be enough to make up for your impenetrable cold, and like the second girl I will die frozen in your arms.”

“Yes,” he said, “it’s just like that. But still you put me off. Surely it will come to nothing in the end. What can you hope to do?”

“Well,” said the girl, “in truth I cannot hope to live, nor do I hope to live, for once I have seen your face I know that I can have no happiness to but kiss you, and to love you, and to have you as my own. I know I will die frozen in your arms, and as far as I am concerned, the sooner it comes the better.”

“Then why do you still put me off?” he asked, circling around her and trying to catch her eye.

“It’s that I am a good girl,” she said, looking away, “raised honest and pure. I will not so much as kiss a boy without my father’s word, and so I’ll take you back to meet him, and once he has given his word, then you can kiss me, and I will die glad to have had you for that one moment as my own.”

The boy laughed and laughed, but still he followed her to her father’s little cottage on the edge of the lake. The girl told Frost’s Boy to wait outside, then went inside and told her father that a boy had come to eat supper with them and to ask her hand in marriage.

Her father was overjoyed because, truth be told, his daughter was not particularly pretty. That is, pretty to be sure, but their house by the lake was far away from the village square, and she wasn’t pretty enough that her fame had reached the other families to bring court for her.

He went to tell his wife and share his joy with her. “Wife,” he said, “our daughter has come with the most wonderful news. Finally a boy has come to marry our daughter. Is it not excellent?”

“No, husband,” said his wife, who was cleverer than her husband by three times or more, “for that is no ordinary boy outside, but Frost’s Boy, who freezes the hearts of girls everywhere, and he has not come to marry our daughter, but to kill her.”

Her husband blanched. “Well, I must drive him away with such strength that he never returns.”

His wife, who was more clever than her husband by three times or more, shook her head sadly. “No, my husband, it is too late for that. It is plain to see that our girl is already in love with him. See how she stares out the window and sighs at him, her eyes wide with affection, her cheeks flushed with desire, even when she knows that he will be the death of her! No, now is not a time for force, but for wits. We must do exactly as I say, or our daughter will be lost forever.”

“Wife,” said the husband, “you have always been cleverer that me by three times or more. So if you have a plan, and I’m sure you do, you need only tell me my own part of it, and I shall do it the very best I can, because I love our daughter more even than myself, and if there is a way yet to save her I will stop at nothing until it is.”

“Go on, and tell our daughter that she should come to the hearth and cook her wedding feast. Then go outside and find work to occupy the hands of our would-be son-in-law. Have him chop wood for the fire, have him draw water from the deep-well, have him do what you would have him do, but do not ask him inside, even for a moment’s rest, until every last bit of the meal is prepared.”

“I will do as you ask as best I can, my clever wife,” her husband said, and with a kiss on her cheek he went off to see Frost’s Boy. He was trembling with fear and doubt, but his love of his daughter and his faith in his wife gave him courage, so he went out into the cold.

Now that she was alone with her daughter, the clever woman took her daughter into her arms. “Now, my daughter,” she said, “we must cook your wedding feast together, and quickly, for I fear your father will not earn us as much time as we would like. As we cook, you must do everything exactly as I say, or else surely you shall be dead by your love’s cold kiss.” The girl nodded, crying a little, for although she coveted her love more than her life, it was not that she had no care for her life at all.

“No tears,” said her mother, wiping them away, “no tears while we are cooking. Every part of the meal we make, we must think only of the love between us, your love for your father, our love for this home we have made in these dark cold lands where winter sleeps an inch beneath the earth.”

As they cooked, and cook they did, the girl’s father met his daughter’s love outside the house. He was still standing there, beautiful as ever, a thin and impatient smile on his face, still laughing to himself at this girl’s strange and novel foolishness.

“Well,” said the girl’s father, his voice quavering a bit in fear at the strange birth before him, “you seem like enough.” He stood at arm’s length from the boy, afraid to touch him.

“You know who I am.” said the boy. “And you know that I will be the death of your daughter as soon as our lips touch. You know that nothing in this world will keep her from me, now that she has seen my eyes. Why do you persist in foolishness and prolong your grief?”

On hearing the boy’s words, the man grew angry, and reared back his fist to hit him. But, before he struck, he remembered his wife’s words, and that no strength would save their daughter, and so he stayed his hand, shrugged his shoulders, and said the rest of the words he’d lined up in his head. “Well, before the dinner gets made, there’s some work to be done, and if you could help me with the work, it’ll go that much faster.”

When he heard that, the boy laughed like the wind in the darkness, stretched long across the narrow trees, and if you heard it even now it would chill you to the bone. “Well then,” he said to the man, “let’s go and see what work you’ve set for me to do.” Then he stepped aside, to follow the man where he might take him.

The man, still shaking a bit, though whether from the cold or from fear or from anger he could not be certain, led the boy behind their little house, to where the wood had been piled high under the back eaves. “Well,” said the man, “the first thing we must do is split wood for the cooking fires. If tonight is to be your wedding feast we must burn the fires high, for we must eat until we can eat no more.” With that, he lifted up an axe and, handing it to the boy, said “Let’s see how you handle yourself with this axe.”

The boy smiled his thin smile and did not take the axe. “What need do I have of the tools of man? I am the son of Frost, himself the son of Winter out of Bone. I need no axe to split a tree or two.” And, with that, he walked up to where the wood was piled, laid his hand on it, and with a great crack the wood blew itself apart into shards and splinters and boards. The man leapt at the sound, and covered his ears and cursed his deafness while the boy laughed and laughed and laughed until he did not stop.

When the man finally took his hands from his ears, the boy turned to him and spoke. “Well, old man,” he said, although in truth the man was not very old at all, and the boy much older, “do you have any other tasks left for me? I am eager for my wedding night.”

“Well,” said the man as he recovered his hearing and his wits, “well,” and could not think of what to say. But then he remembered what his wife had said, that he must keep this boy busy until the wedding feast was made. “Well done, my son-to-be, but there is more work to be done. Next, we must draw water from the deep well, water to toast your happiness, for we are poor folk without a coin for wine.”

The boy laughed, and smiled his smile, and followed the man to the well.

The man led the boy to his deep well, a well so deep that even at summer’s noon you could not see the bottom of it, that ran with the sound of an underground river and gave water even in the dead of winter. He handed the boy the bucket and rope and said, “Best to start soon, for the drawing will take a while—the well is deep and its water heavy.”

The boy simply smiled and did not take the bucket. “What need do I have of the tools of man? I am the son of Frost, and in my father’s house beneath the earth my playmates were the waters and the worms. I have no need of a bucket to draw a draught of water.” And, with that, he walked up to the well and called into it softly, with the sweet words of his childhood, speaking in the oldest manner that his father used with him, and all of a sudden a great rushing sound came up from the well, and a fountain of water came up from it, and the boy was bathed in cold, clean water from the earth. The man leapt at the sight, and cowered away from the water and swore aloud while the boy played with the water, and laughed and laughed and laughed until he did not stop.

When the waters finally subsided, leaving the boy clean and dry, he turned to the man and spoke. “Well, old man,” he said, although in truth the man was not very old at all, and the boy much older, “do you have any other tasks left for me? I am eager for my wedding night.”

The man stood there for a moment, agape at the spelling that he had just witnessed. When he recovered his wits, he tried to recall what his wife, who was cleverer than him by three times or more, had told him to do next. But, try as he might, he could not recall it, for in truth she had not said anything more to him. Clever as she was, how could she have anticipated the prodigy of Frost’s Boy?

The man hemmed and hawed and stilled and stalled until the boy grew impatient, and his lenient smile turn colder and darker until it was not a smile at all. Finally, he lost his patience entirely. “Out with it, old man!” he shouted. “Or else I shall be back at your house before you breathe again and claim your daughter as my own by force and by guile.”

Finally, though more out of desperation than cleverness, the man hit upon another task. “Well done, my son-to-be,” he said, “but there is more work to be done before the feast. Next, we must slaughter one of the pigs, for we must have fresh meat for a wedding feast, for the wedding of our only daughter is not a time to spare a single thing, and we must eat until we can eat no more.” And, with that, the man led the boy to where they kept their hogs and, pressing a knife into his hand, said, “Take care with the knife, for I’ve just sharpened it the other day.”

The boy scoffed, and threw the knife into the earth. “What need have I of the tools of man? I have labored long winters beside the coldest winds, comrades with the night, and done the work of the gripping hunger in this tall dark and in all that work, the killing is the work that I love the best. I have killed ten thousand in my time, and in my time to come I shall kill ten thousand more. Why should I need a knife to kill a simple pig?” And, with that, he walked over to where the hogs huddled together in the straw and, laying his hand upon the largest one, froze it dead.

When the pig was cold and dead, he turned back to the man and spoke. “Well, old man,” he said, although in truth the man was not very old at all, “do you have any other tasks left for me? I am eager for my wedding night.” He grinned, for he knew the man would not set another task before him.

But now the man laughed, a single great guffaw from deep in his chest. He smiled right back at the boy and took up the knife from floor and pressed it into the puzzled boy’s cold hand. “The slaughter that men do,” he explained, “is much more than simply killing. After the killing comes the butchery, and I’d imagine that you’ve made it ten times harder on yourself with whatever strange works you’ve done to that poor hog. For it’ll be cold and frozen guts that you’ll be cleaning.”

Now the boy knew he had been tricked, and his eyes flashed with anger. He almost killed the man where he stood, killed him dead with a glance and walked out into the snow never to speak another human word again. But, then his mind thought of the girl that waited for him in the house, the pretty girl that he could kill, and he knew that if he lost this chance, if even one girl was the better of his beauty, it would haunt him for the rest of time. So instead he set to the cold and dirty work of cleaning the pig.

• • • •

When Frost’s Boy was done with his long work, he was covered in blood and the bloody guts of the pig he had frozen and drenched in the strange sweat of his own labor. For while none would say his father’s work was easy, such world’s work is done just as it is done, as we breathe or as we cry, effortless and smooth without toil nor tire. The work of man, though, is the work of purpose, and such work of doing what’s easiest undone was strange to him. So when he was done rooting out the dead pig’s guts, he collapsed from the exhaustion. And when the boy finally stood once more, the man offered out his hand and spoke to him for the first time without fear.

“Well, boy, I’ll say it was the worst butchering that I’d ever seen, but that wouldn’t do it rightmost, so we’d best just leave it all unspoken. But it seems you’ve got some spirit in your frosty little heart, for when I handed you a knife the second time I’d aswear you would have stalked into the long night and never spoke a human word again. You’ve done it, for better or for ill, and I’ll say a second time tonight I see you’re like enough, and this second time you’ll have the meaning of it, too.”

The boy had thought that he would have been too tired for anger, but at the man’s words he found it welling up inside of him like blood from fresh cut. He spat into the man’s hand and it crackled in air and struck bruising like a stone. “You ignorant fool!” he screamed at the man. “You ignorant moribund fool! Don’t you see what’s in front of your eyes? Don’t you hear what’s spoken to your ears? I have come not to glorify your hold, but to destroy it! When I have your daughter as my bride, I will not love her, I will not hold her, and there will be no posterity for your line. My first kiss is death for her, death for you, death for your house. I am not your hopeful fluttering suitor; I am the son of Frost, and I have done the work of winter for longer than the memory of man. Do not give me your welcomes but guard your house against my frozen heart that brings nothing but its ruin!”

With that, the man stopped laughing. He lifted up the knife from the place the tired boy had dropped it, and began to clean it. “We’d best be back soon,” he said at last, without looking up. “Your wedding will be waiting.”

• • • •

While the men had done their work outdoors, the girl and her mother were hard at cooking the wedding feast. When boy and man crossed the door, they found the table piled high with all manner of foods: soup from salmon and red cabbage, stew with dumplings from beets and carrots and onions and old beef, hot breads in all ten types, pies and puddings and stuffings and smells like the boy had never known before in his cold and quiet home an inch beneath the earth. The heat of the hearth and the sense of the smells and the empty hole of his just-passed anger crashed against his frozen heart, and he stumbled a bit as he stepped to the table.

When the girl saw her love stumble she leapt to his side to hold him, but her mother held her back. “Remember what I told you,” she said to the girl, although in all the times I’ve heard this story they’ve never spoken plainly what that was, “and you must do it just so or your love will only last a night.” And, though the girl was eager for even the slightest touch of her love’s cold skin, she was a good girl, raised honest and pure, and so she heeded what her mother had told her, and instead of any touch she pulled out a chair, and asked him to sit at the head of the table, closest to the hearth and furthest from the door.

Her mother, meanwhile, greeted her husband, and took from him the frozen pork. As soon as she touched the icy meat, she knew at once what had happened, and she smiled at her husband and praised his heart. “Truly,” she said, “I would not have even thought of it myself.” He smiled at this, for he knew that his wife was cleverer than him by three times or more, but she went on with barely a pause. “But now is not the time for praises, for we must cook this meat before these courses are finished, or our pretty daughter will yet be lost to us all.”

With her love so seated in the place of honor, the girl wanted nothing more than to ignore her mother’s warnings, stop her work, and stare at that beautiful boy’s face and kiss him until they both should die. But she clung to her obedience, and got from the hearth a boiling pot of soup, made with salmon, red cabbage, and other clever means known to her mother for such circumstances. She served up the soup in a bowl of old wood, so hot that it still churned as she laid it before him, and gave to him a new copper spoon. “Here is the first of our wedding feast,” she told him, “made by my own art so you might know my skills, made by my own hands so you might know my love, and both so as you might welcome me as wife. Eat it up now, and tell me what suffices.”

The soup smelled of love and red fish in the winter and the fire that raged behind him, but as the boy dipped his spoon to it and brought it succulent to his lips it began to change. For hot as the still boiling soup was, the cold of Frost’s love was colder, and by the time he had lifted to the spoon to his mouth the soup had cracked and crackled and frozen solid. Still, he chewed it deliberately, and the girl heard the slow crunch as his teeth ground the ice into snow. “It is not the flavor that I mind,” he said after a time, “but it is cooked a bit tough.” Nevertheless, he finished the bowl that she had set before him, taking bite after bite all frozen by his cold and tired heart.

No sooner had he finished the bowl than she served up on a cracked clay plate the first five hot breads—made with meats and what spring vegetables remain. “Here is the second of our wedding feast,” she told him, “made by my own art so you might know my skills, made by my own hands so you might know my love, and both so as you might welcome me as wife. Eat it up now, and tell me what suffices.”

The breads smelled of home and butter and wheat left long in drying, yet even as the boy lifted them up to his lips, the fat on them curled and congealed at the chill of his blood. And as he bit into the hot breads, even the puff of steam held within them froze as ice around his lips, for hot as that steam was, the cold of Frost’s love was colder. Still, he chewed and swallowed each of the breads in turn, and the girl heard the crackle of the freezing steam within his mouth. “It is not the flavor that I mind,” he said after a time, “but it is cooked a bit dry.” Nevertheless, he finished the plate that she had set before him, each bread after bread all ruined by his cold and tired heart.

And so it went from one dish to another, and although there are those that tell the detail of every course I will not worry you with them. In truth, there is not much difference from one bit to the next and I find the whole accounting of no merit at all. So let us simply say that that she set dish after dish before him, exactly in the manner appointed by custom, and he ate and ate and ate all manner of new things that he had never had before, though each was ruined a different way by the cold within his blood, until at last the woman and her husband came out with great slices of the pork that they had roasted, that he had slaughtered by his own beautiful hand.

The mother put great cuts of the meat before him—all flesh and fat and neither bone nor gristle—and spoke as she did so, just as her daughter did and as custom demanded, for clever as she was she could find no better words to say. “Here is the last of your wedding feast,” she told him, “that pork was slaughtered out of this home’s stock, but by your foreign hand, and if you find it good, then it shall be the last of things and we will call all such matters settled, and ours yours, and yours ours, until nothing shall end it, for the rest of all our days. Eat it up now, and say if it suffices.”

The pork sizzled with fat and hot fire, and although he was by now quite stuffed, it was quick and eager that the boy lifted it to his mouth and bit it. The taste was heat and blood and death and all such other works of men in winter, his own labor and this home earth, the warm hearth dug against the cold, and the smooth flavor of fat, and he knew that by his own hand it was done and it was good. And the girl, who all along had had no scrap, no bite for her own (though she did not mind it for her lovesickness), watched as the hot fat ran down his face, not chilling nor cooling nor whitening, but running smooth and clear in its own heat. And she knew at once—for she was a good girl, raised honest and pure, and remembered her mother’s word just as it was spoken—and because she was a good girl she knew that the curse on the boy had been broken, that the ice around his heart had melted, and all at once she threw herself on him and embraced him and kissed him with all the strength that her longing would muster.

• • • •

Her love was true. When she kissed Frost’s Boy, in that first of many, his heart had already melted, and he was no longer Frost’s Boy at all. She did not freeze nor die at the touch of him, and instead they were just a boy and a girl and loved each other in simple ways accordingly. And though it was spring before they could be given a word for their marriage, from that night on they lived as husband and wife, ordinary except for their beauty and their honesty.

I am told, and it must be true, that they lived happily and together for that and all the rest of their days. I am told that he never raised a hand to her in anger or in fear; I am told that he never had a harsh word for her, and that she never gave him cause for harshness; I am told that he never took their son out into the great drifts of forest snow and shoved his face into it, over and over, laughing all the while, punishing him for not being as beautiful as his father, until the boy stopped shaking and turned blue; I am told that she never found their son holding the frozen body of their cat, even in the high heat of a summer long-day, looking at that animal he loved and crying and then looking up at her and smiling; that he never came back late in the winter’s long-night, not saying where he’d been, with his skin cold and his breathe icicles, and the neighbor’s daughter dead the next morning beneath the ice of the old pond; that he never froze the breath in her mouth even as she slept, just so he could watch and laugh as she struggled and choked and gasped for life; that he never got cold and angry, so angry that he woke her up in the morning with both of their children crying in front of her and asked her which one she loved more, because that’s the one he would kill for whatever slight he had imagined; that she never took her children, wrapped in their winter coats even in the summer, to flee in the middle of the short summer night; that the winds and the ravens never saw them, never told him where they were, never drew him to them, seething with an anger so cold it froze the air; that she never wrapped herself with her daughter in every blanket and shuddered her to life; that she never had to do it over and over, every time he was angry, every time one of them had drawn his notice, or his gaze.

I am told that none of those things ever happened, and it must be true because, after all, this is a story. How can stories end but with a “happily ever after”?

©2021 by P H Lee.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

P H Lee lives on top of an old walnut tree, past a thicket of roses, down a dead end street at the edge of town. Their work has appeared in many venues including Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Uncanny Magazine. From time to time, they microwave and eat a frozen burrito at two in the morning, for no reason other than that they want to.

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

The Unfinished Land

Greg Bear | 1814 words

Reynard, a young apprentice, seeks release from the drudgery of working for his fisherman uncle in the English village of Southwold. His rare days off lead him to strange encounters—not just with press gangs hoping to fill English ships to fight the coming Spanish Armada, but strangers who seem to know him—one of whom casts a white shadow.

The village’s ships are commandeered, and after a fierce battle at sea, Reynard finds himself the sole survivor of his uncle’s devastated hoy. For days he drifts, starving and dying of thirst, until he is rescued by a galleon, also lost—and both are propelled by a strange current to the unknown northern island of Thule. Here Reynard must meet his destiny in a violent clash between humans and gods.

Available February 16, 2021 from John Joseph Adams Books.

Chapter One
Broken Armada

Reynard Shotwood, no longer a boy, not yet a man, had pushed the last of his dead shipmates overboard two days before. Rubbing crusted salt from his eyes, he tried to say another prayer for them and for himself, but his lips were broken and his tongue filled his mouth so he could not make the words.

His uncle and the crew, English fishermen from the coastal town of Southwold, had been cut to pieces by grapeshot from a Spanish galleass. Except for one finger, missing its tip to the knuckle, Reynard had not been touched. But now, a week or more later, he was parched and starving.

Unfamiliar currents carried him through a thick, night-gray fog that looped and writhed over the toppled mast and the shredded sails like a sky filled with maggots. He had spent long, numb hours watching the bloodless, broken bodies of his uncle, the uncle’s partner in the boat, and the partner’s son bump and bob against the timbers and upper step of the  mast, caught in eddies that seemed to mimic the whorls in the fog, the bodies rolling now and then to show their faces–if they still had faces–and stare blankly, resentfully, as if he should help them climb back aboard and resume their duties.

“Yare, fast away!” He could almost hear his uncle’s cry as their boat tried to flee the Spanish; but it was only a patting breeze and waves slopping through the scuppers. Now the bodies were gone, sunk or grabbed by sharks, those snapping dogs of the sea–but the fog still turned the sun into a cold moon and shaded the moon as dim and gray as death itself.

The sloop-rigged hoy, once as hardworking a boat as ever harvested the sea, managed to stay afloat even with its larboard a mass of wrenched decking thrust through with broken timbers. The starboard, rising a few fingers above the dark, lapping water, likely held a bubble, but soon that would leak away and the wreck would sink and no one would ever know how long Reynard had been out here, alive, alone–but of course not afraid. Not now. The worst had happened, other than dying, and fishermen often died. Their names were carved into boards nailed on the walls of his family church–a good Protestant church. But dead all the same, and so many.

And now many more.

The great battle off the coast of Flanders had been long and fierce. Boats from Southwold had left their dozing harbor to serve the English fleet, at the command of Lord Walsyngham and the Queen, though the fishing season was but half done and many families might go hungry–but the desperate need of Elizabeth and of England against Philip’s devils overcame village sense.

With the awful memory of the seaborne power the English ships had faced, it was easy for Reynard to imagine the Duke of Parma’s soldiers filling the streets of London with forests of muskets and half-pikes, crested steel helms thick and shiny as shingle on a beach–and row upon row of great bronze Spanish cannons rolling, flaming, and bucking, blowing up homes and churches, intent on punishing all who followed the faith of Henry and Elizabeth and not Mary of ill regard. Maybe there was no home to return to.

Not the best sailor or apprentice, he had never wanted to go to sea, and yet had never found his place on land. His mother, a once-lovely woman who had withered early under the toll of being a fisherman’s widow, lamented her son’s pointless fascination with bushes and birds, ferrets and mice, snakes and turtles–more interested in studying the insides of fish than catching or making them ready for market. He could see her now, a sallow-faced, gray-haired figure, with a perpetual half-smile–though she was no idiot, and had taught him letters early on–pounding out washing or packing oysters and lobsters into barrels, graced with slimy, odorous seaweed, for sale in any of the five larger towns nearby, or even in London after a night journey, to avoid the heat of the summer sun.

Reynard was too numb for regrets, though he suspected that if he lived much longer, an unlikely prospect, he would have many. Could he regret not being more grateful for a home and a roof–though a leaky roof, thatch unchanged for years–or regret not being a better nephew, which he did not, not yet, and not much? Perhaps he could regret not having planned a way to keep the hoy clear of the galleass. His mind worked that way, regretting the undone and impossible, not the undone but doable. He preferred contemplating inventions and miracles, not plotting and planning actual work. He preferred reading to playing but had neither books nor companions, since his life was spent in service, mostly, to his uncle, with barely a day off in a month.

In what was left of the hoy, Reynard had recovered a cask of salt cod and two butts of water. One butt had been holed and the second, poorly coopered, had leaked dry. The hoy had been meant to convey stores to the Queen’s great ships, but the promised supplies had not arrived in Southwold by the time the boats put out to sea. There should have been more victuals for the English fleet, from the shore, from the Queen, before they engaged–so his uncle had complained. Only Reynard had lived long enough to suffer for it. His uncle was a hard man, a tough master, but fair enough and smart, and despite everything, Reynard had loved him as a grizzled, thick-browed, heavy-jawed, masculine mountain in his young life.

Maybe now, pulling his feet from the water and going through these memories, he could find his regrets. But for the nonce, sharks were of more concern. Their low triangular fins popped up here and there, swishing, probing, no doubt remembering they had found food around this wreck before. He did not want to further flavor the ocean with his toes.

He rose on wobbly legs, feet wedged against the gunwale to see any change in the flat gray sea. No change. In the days since the battle, the fog had tempted with its promise of moisture. He had carefully gathered the remains of the spritsail and knuckled a dip in the canvas to catch fog and rain, but the fog did not condense or drip, and there had been no rain since the easterly winds and violent storms had broken up the Spanish fleet.

Reynard stared at the barrel of salt cod. At his present level of thirst, the thick white flesh, hard as wood, was worse than useless, with no water but seawater in which to soak it. Salt from either could drive him mad.

Having been fishing and delivering freight for only three years, Reynard had not yet had time to absorb all his uncle’s sea lore, but he suspected–he felt, in a strange way–that the currents which drove the wreck were carrying him north and west. For most of a day, he passed through a slightly brackish flow, probably out of the Baltic, where shoals of herring and mackeral, along with sturgeon and fat bream and plaice, drew out English boats to compete with the Basques, the Dutch, and the French. On their first fishing expedition, his uncle had dipped a ladle in that water and offered it to his lips, to let him taste it, to remember the flavor of its source and learn how to find his way by tongue as well as eye. Now the sea was colder and saltier. That did not seem to match any currents his uncle had taught him, not for this time of year, when the North Sea warmed. Perhaps the great battle, with its flashes and cries, its explosions and whistling shot, had frightened the sea into its own madness.

By morning of what he was sure would be his last day, Reynard’s cracked skin was streaked with blood and salt and a long gulp of seawater seemed a good, a necessary, option, if only to soften his lips and relieve his parched throat. Still, perhaps in honor of his dead uncle, he had so far resisted, knowing that he would shortly thereafter follow his shipmates to the bottom.

Reynard’s head lolled. He tried to stay awake night after night and was now losing that struggle. Even as something powerful bumped his foot, he could not open his eyes, until abruptly he heard deep thumps and great splashes. He pulled his feet up tight against his butt and blinked until he saw, across the half-submerged deck, that a long, silvery-gray shark had pushed up to get at him and was stuck–unable to thrash free and back to the sea. Now it twisted and tossed its long scimitar tail, and gaped the most frightful open-jaw threats inches from his ankles and toes, its deep-sunk eyes intent on either dining or causing the ship to break apart. Reynard was already soaked, but rolled over the gunwale aft and grabbed for a splintered rudder bar. Without thought of the danger, so close was he already to death, he braced his feet against the broken planks, leaned out over the deck, wedged the bar under the shark’s heaving middle, then hunched along on his knees and fairly lifted the great fish, teeth and dead eyes and all, back into the sea.

After crawling aft to the only dry patch that remained, he leaned back, felt his toes to make sure all remained, and continued his shivering and weary watch. The sea, gray and uniform beneath greenish-gray sky, resumed its boring mien.

Copyright © 2021 by Greg Bear. Excerpted from The Unfinished Land by Greg Bear. Published by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights reserved.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Greg Bear has authored more than thirty novels and five story collections, earning him five Nebulas, two Hugos, two Endeavors, and China’s Galaxy Award. He helped teach the first class in Sci-Fi/Fantasy at San Diego State College and is one of the original founders of San Diego Comic-Con.

Book Review: Afro Puffs Are the Antennae of the Universe by Zig Zag Claybourne

LaShawn M. Wanak | 620 words

Afro Puffs Are the Antennae of the Universe
Zig Zag Claybourne
Paper / Ebook
ISBN: 9781732298019
Obsidian Sky Books, December 2020, 340 pages

It’s the start of the new year of 2021. I’m writing this review in November 2020, right after the election. It’s a bit hard for me to contemplate what life will be like in January. Will the COVID vaccine be finally out? (Maybe.) Will there be a peaceful transition in the White House? (I hope so, but I don’t really know.) With all the questions, I needed a book that would distract me from the tumultuous times. A book that spoke to beauty and creativity but wasn’t overly complicated. Something that I could put down at any time but would also be there when I woke up with anxiety in the middle of the night.

Enter Zig Zag Claybourne and his soul food of a book, Afro Puffs Are the Antennae of the Universe.

Desiree Quicho, captain of the spaceship Aerie, and her crew have just pulled off an amazing heist of a transportation device, the Bilomatic Entrance, from an evil corporation bent on controlling the universe. Now all she wants to do is relax and build her house on the beach of Atlantis while she waits for her husband to return from his own interstellar trip with the Brothers Jetstream. But people keep trying to blow her plans up—literally. Also, the Bilomatic Entrance has somehow become sentient and now plans to wreak havoc by bringing humankind to enlightenment in its own way.

How to describe this book? Start with the absurdity of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe. Throw in the funkified redemption elements of Janelle Monáe’s ArchAndroid and George Clinton’s Atomic Dog. Sprinkle in the lyrical richness of James Baldwin and Parliament. Read snuggled on your couch, under blankets, during a time when the world makes no sense and you crave the comfort of women being confronted with insanity and saying, “Well, guess it’s up to us to save the world again.”

I will confess, I had a hard time with the beginning of the book. Afro Puffs is not exactly a sequel to Claybourne’s book The Brothers Jetstream: Leviathan, but readers will need to read that book in order to get the full experience. There were a lot of references to the Brothers Jetstream and the False Prophet Buford that might have been more impactful if I had read the first book. It was also hard to differentiate between the numerous characters and their motivations.

But what hooked me from page one was the language. It’s zany, its goofy, it’s poetic, sometimes deep, and oftentimes hilarious. I wish I could pull quotes from this book, because the writing is so smooth it’s like jazz. It made me decide to just roll with the book and let the language do its thing. And through that, it made me appreciate how Desiree approached life. There is something about a bunch of badass black women saving the world through general badassery, even if that meant capturing her enemies and then using their knowledge and skills to help instead of punishing them. There were some enemies, though, who did get their due comeuppance, and the revenge was sweet and hilarious.

Plus, the book comes with a soundtrack list. You can never go wrong with that.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

LaShawn M. Wanak has been writing speculative fiction stories professionally since 2006. Her works have appeared in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018, Fireside Magazine, FIYAH, and many others. She is the editor of GigaNotoSaurus and reviews books for Lightspeed Magazine. Writing stories keeps her sane. Also, pie. Visit her blog at tbonecafe.wordpress.com.

Book Review: Heroes’ Feast: The Official D&D Cookbook

Chris Kluwe | 740 words

Heroes’ Feast: The Official D&D Cookbook
Kyle Newman, Jon Peterson, Michael Witwer
Hardcover / eBook
ISBN: 9781984858900
Ten Speed Press, October 2020, 211 pages

Salutations, readers! This month I’d like to tell you about a book that doesn’t so much tell you a story as one that allows you to create your own, and that is Heroes’ Feast, the official D&D cookbook by Wizards of the Coast. Fortunately for the non-Dungeons and Dragons fans out there, being a role-playing enthusiast isn’t required to appreciate the recipes in this book; it works perfectly fine as an assorted collection of various soups, appetizers, main courses, desserts, and libations for any household.

The first thing that impressed me about Heroes’ Feast was the production quality of the book itself. The hardback is filled with page after glossy page of full-color photos that are just as much a feast for the eyes as the food they capture, and almost every dish has an accompanying picture of the finished product (impossibly stylized, as anyone who’s spent even a second on social media knows all food pictures are). There are also multiple full-page art pieces that look as if they came straight from a player’s handbook to introduce each new chapter, which are broken up into various D&D cultures (human, elf, dwarf, halfling, and uncommon cuisine).

Speaking of the cuisine, while the recipes have obviously D&D-inspired names (Arkhan the Cruel’s Flame-Roasted Halfling Chili!), the dishes themselves are a fairly broad spread of recognizable western European/American cooking, ranging from the simple (basic tempura, various breads, a starter salad) to the complex (bouillabaisse and an entire roast turkey with stuffing and gravy are among the more notable ones), but all are presented in an efficient manner that lays out the ingredients and cooking instructions in an easy, step-by-step fashion that requires only the most minimal of cooking skills. Basically, as long as you don’t roll natural ones on a consistent basis in the kitchen, you can make anything in this book.

As a regular at-home cook, one of the things I really appreciated in Heroes’ Feast was that the ingredients themselves were not ridiculously obscure/specialized, and they also overlap between quite a few different recipes (there’s nothing worse than a recipe that calls for half an ounce of fresh unicorn horn and you know you’re never going to use it in anything else until it rots away in your pantry). Ninety-nine percent of what you’ll need for any of the recipes is likely available at your local supermarket, and any leftovers can be repurposed into another dish for another day, whether it’s mythical or mundane.

I think my only quibble with Heroes’ Feast is that it felt a little too focused on western European/American dishes—sure, there are a couple outliers such as hummus, kebabs, and a stir fry—but for the most part it keeps the Eurocentric palate that flavors a lot of older D&D editions, which is a shame because the current D&D universe is as varied as the people who play it. That being said, a cookbook, unlike a dungeon master’s manual, is only a series of guidelines, not hard and fast rules that must be followed no matter what, so hopefully Heroes’ Feast can serve as a springboard for readers eager to explore other exciting cuisines. (I’ll also note real quick that while there are several vegetarian recipes, most of the book is decidedly meat-based when it comes to protein).

Overall, if you’re looking for a way to spice up game night, searching for new techniques to hone your chef’s knife +1, or even if you’ve never cooked before and want something to help you take the plunge, you can’t go wrong with Heroes’ Feast. Just make sure you source your halflings ethically and sustainably.

Read if: You like the Joy of Cooking (basilisks); you think your DM might be susceptible to food-based bribery; you always wondered what those Dragonlance potatoes would taste like.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chris Kluwe grew up in Southern California among a colony of wild chinchillas and didn’t learn how to communicate outside of barking and howling until he was fourteen years old. He has played football in the NFL, once wrestled a bear for a pot of gold, and lies occasionally. He is also the eternal disappointment of his mother, who just can’t understand why he hasn’t cured cancer yet. Do you know why these bio things are in third person? I have no idea. Please tell me if you figure it out.

Book Review: Never Have I Ever by Isabel Yap

Arley Sorg | 934 words

Never Have I Ever
Isabel Yap
Trade Paperback / Ebook
ISBN: 9781618731821
Small Beer Press, February 2021, 316 pgs

When Isabel Yap isn’t at work in the tech industry, she is writing the kind of fiction that soaks up your awareness, that immerses you in moods and moments and leaves you stunned. Her earliest publications appear in places such as Philippine Speculative Fiction Volume V, Diaspora Ad Astra: Science Fiction from the Philippines, and Horror: Filipino Fiction for Young Adults. The effect of reading a few of her stories is a gentle hunger, a slowly building desire to seek out more of her work and savor it. The fact that her first stories appeared outside the usual US short fiction markets is a strong argument for the need of genre readers and reviewers to seek work from beyond our borders, as well as to acknowledge the taste of editors outside the usual batch of regulars appearing on our major awards circuits, editors who recognized a skilled storyteller.

The good news: Collections such as this one are like ordering the tasting menu at a fine restaurant. After you finish that first story, you will sit in silence, letting it sink in, completely taken by the lingering effects. And when that hunger to read more tugs at you: Thankfully, there’s more on offer, carefully curated via the exacting standards of Gavin Grant and Kelly Link of Small Beer Press.

Opening story “Good Girls” is an absolute win. Originally published in Shimmer, it’s the kind of piece which makes you want to throw money at a magazine; to subscribe and read everything. The prose pulls you in, the moment immediate, the scene intimate, grotesque, and beautiful at once. The narrator is a monster who flies through the night and feasts on the vulnerable and unsuspecting. But the narrative renders the monster as human-ish and strange in the best of ways, as she navigates fragile relationships, as well as her own desires and limitations. Set largely at the Bakersfield Good Girl Reformation Retreat, a camp meant to correct behavior, this story goes further by exploring depression, gender oppression, friendship, and more, every line and thought nuanced, every theme smoothly delivered. But what really delights me is the surprise; and for this reason, this piece is a wonderful starter. Mastery is on display here: decisions that take the tale to the unexpected; reveals and tilts of plot that make sense, that never feel gratuitous, and yet, altogether, create an utterly unique journey. Dreamlike, layered, rich. An absolute win.

Mastery of story and surprise continues through many of the pieces in this book. “A Cup of Salt Tears” is a fantastic tale, originally published at Tor.com. It’s nearly as delightfully unsettling and strange as “Good Girls,” and combined, these two—let alone the rest of the collection—should be enough to place Yap among the best writers of weird, dark fantasy, and horror. Makino is slowly drowning in her grief as her husband is dying in the hospital. A kappa intrudes upon her grief, a demon known to haunt waters; this one claiming to have saved her when she was young. What follows is a mesmerizing exploration of a strange and solemn love.

“Have You Heard the One About Anamaria Marquez?” plays on the notion of schoolyard myths: stories kids tell to each other, each one more fantastical than the last, often horrific and, if we pay attention, telling of the fears inhabiting the lives of kids. Set in a private school, the through line is about a shifting friendship between Mica and her friend Hazel. After hearing a story about opening the third eye, Hazel declares that she’s done it; Mica doesn’t believe her, and their friendship is strained. The through line is broken into segments by short bits about Anamaria Marquez and the various ways that she died—each one leaving her as a dangerous ghost. As a whole, this story is startling, clever, bold, and very entertaining.

“Milagroso” is set in a near future where people eat synthetically produced foods and natural foods are not only considered rare, but potentially dangerous, at least by some. Others consider natural foods a blessing, a miracle. Marty brings his new family to visit his childhood home, and takes part in a festival which celebrates natural foods, among people who have become slightly strange to him, people who tell him a true miracle is about to happen. This is a beautiful story about family and cultural connections, seasoned with a touch of irony.

“Syringe” is one of three previously unpublished pieces, a very short tale of an ailing woman in a hospital surrounded by humanlike robot nurses and doctors. Even within the span of a few pages, Yap develops moments of devastating sweetness, layered with melancholy, framed by a science fictional notion, and steeped in the complexities of grief.

There are more wonderful stories to be sampled in this collection, thirteen in all. These are a few which are on my mind, which call me back to Yap’s work. I urge you to dig in, to experience the dark wonder of a seriously underrated writer, and to take your time savoring these stories. Yap will surprise you, she will startle you, and she will impress you.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Arley Sorg is co-Editor-in-Chief of Fantasy Magazine, senior editor at Locus Magazine, and associate editor at both Lightspeed and Nightmare. He reviews books for Locus, Lightspeed, and Cascadia Subduction Zone and is an interviewer for Clarkesworld Magazine. Arley grew up in England, Hawaii, and Colorado, and studied Asian Religions at Pitzer College. He lives in Oakland, and, in non-pandemic times, usually writes in local coffee shops. He is a 2014 Odyssey Writing Workshop graduate.

Author Spotlight: Anjali Sachdeva

Laurel Amberdine | 970 words

When the story started out, I knew something had to go wrong, because it’s a story of course, but I did not expect a cautionary tale about the importance of gut bacteria and network security! Very cool. How did this story come together for you? Did it give you any surprises along the way?

Initially, the story was very short—actually a flash piece. But I loved the premise and kept feeling like I had more to say. So in part, the very fact that it became so long was a surprise. Jade also surprised me. Initially I thought of her as a side character, a minor player without much personality. But the more I wrote, the more I liked her and wanted to see what she could do with this world, given that she wasn’t the one who created it but was trapped there just as Ash was. And finally, there were some points in the plot where I felt like I was being challenged alongside the characters. When Jade figures out how to use the aggregator to solve her long-term food problem, for instance, that was not something I had planned ahead. I too was shaking my head and asking myself, “Why didn’t I think of that sooner?”

I don’t know if TV producers read these spotlights, but if there are any out there, I would like to suggest that this would make a great TV episode of something, like Black Mirror. Especially since you have so many great visuals. I really liked the crows. How did you go about designing the world and picking the elements you have? Is there any favorite bit you want to make sure readers noticed?

Well, thanks, I certainly wouldn’t object! It’s funny that you noted the crows, because they were actually the last element I added to the story. As I said, part of what interests me here is the way Jade becomes more powerful and more at home in this world as the story goes on. But as I was finishing the story, I realized I wanted some physical manifestation of that, and the crows were the physical presence I chose. As carrion eaters, they’re often associated with death, and the story is also about the necessity of death and decay. But beyond that, Jade’s relationship with the crows allowed me to visualize the ways in which she was becoming integrated into the life of this strange planet. At first she’s repelled by them, but by the end she’s literally wearing their feathers and having them sit on her body or fly around her. When I was preparing to do the last draft of the story I wrote a note at the top that said “ADD CROWS,” and as I did they became one of my favorite parts. So there they are.

The entire story also started with another image (years back—I’m a slow writer!): the opening image of the trees that were constantly dropping their leaves in the perpetual autumn of this planet, creating huge piles of dead leaves that never disappear. It’s an image that I find both beautiful and chilling, and that is the tone I hoped to set for the story.

This felt like a suitable pandemic tale, with the two of them totally isolated, though who knows what state of lockdown/former lockdown readers may be in when the issue comes out. How have you been holding up with everything 2020 has been offering?

Yes! As I said, I’ve been working on this story for a few years, off and on, but once it became clear that the pandemic was going to be a long-term thing, I thought, “I really have to finish this one now.” Not only because the characters are so isolated, but because COVID and lockdown have made me think so much about how we interact with microbes, how much mental space we spend on the destructive ones and how little we usually think about the ones that help us and make our lives possible.

The pandemic has been tough in a lot of ways, of course. I miss my siblings, my nephew, my extended family. I miss writing in coffee shops, as trivial as that sounds. And like everyone, I really miss my friends, and even just interacting with strangers. But there have been some silver linings. I’ve been spending time outdoors almost every day, even in the colder weather, and it has forced me to slow down a bit and really enjoy the ways the natural world changes with the seasons. And I’ve been extremely fortunate to have a National Endowment for the Arts grant this year, which has allowed me to continue writing. I’m helping to homeschool my kids, which was not part of my plan for this year before COVID arrived, and if I had to do my usual full-time teaching on top of that I’m sure I would not have time to write. So I’m grateful for the work I’m being allowed to do.

What have you been working on lately? Any new or forthcoming work that readers can look for?

I’m currently working on a novel set in a gender-segregated world. It has a pandemic section that I wrote long before the current pandemic, so that has been a little strange to live through (and I joke with my friends that I could have saved a lot of time on research by just waiting until 2020). A short story based on material from the book will be published in the MIT Technology Review this month.

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: Adam-Troy Castro

Jude Griffin | 433 words

I spent some time trying to make the Kharbat align with the Heisenberg uncertainty principle writ large: Was that in your head at all?

The most boring answer of all: No.

As I was wrestling with the logic of the Kharbat and my sense of inadequacy to bring the right questions to it, I started thinking about who is your ideal reader? Do you imagine one? Have you met one?

I am reminded of the reader who penned an angry missive to one of my regular markets, outright ordering them to buy no more of my stories, because “What I look for in science fiction is a problem and a hero who solves it, with a happy ending! None of the corruption Adam-Troy Castro writes about!”

That is not my ideal reader.

My ideal reader, for short stories at least, has always been someone who is willing to take a journey blind without advance promises of specific story elements, to wit: “This story is about a heroic quest and there is at least one elf in it.” My ideal reader is someone who won’t complain afterward that they only like stories if the main character is “likeable,” if it takes place in a world where they would like to live. And I fortunately meet this kind of reader all the time. I think I’m talking to one now.

Is there anything else that you would like readers to know about “Kharbat”?

Only that it was a one-day composition, a weird idea I woke with that was done with by dinnertime. I love when that happens.

Do you think about your stories in categories (not genres)?

Not while conceiving them, no. A lot of times in recent years, stories written as fantasy (and one as mainstream science fiction) sold as horror, or vice-versa. I am most proud of the ones that don’t seem to fit any category but strangeness.

Which stories are the easiest/hardest to place?

Nightmare Magazine aside, selling horror is a bitch, and selling horror of longer than 5,000 words is an especially grievous bitch. Passing 10,000 is like entering a land of unknown fortunes. Honestly. It’s a small target, and it’s all bullseye.

Easiest would be stories about my recurring characters, Andrea Cort and John Draiken; I compose those with a fair degree of certainty that they will be taken by Analog, which has been the home of all such stories so far.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Jude Griffin is an envirogeek, writer, and photographer. She trained llamas at the Bronx Zoo; was a volunteer EMT, firefighter, and HAZMAT responder; worked as a guide and translator for journalists covering combat in Central America; lived in a haunted village in Thailand; ran an international frog monitoring network; and loves happy endings. Bonus points for frolicking dogs and kisses backlit by a shimmering full moon.

Author Spotlight: D. Thomas Minton

Elan Samuel | 642 words

This is a fascinating piece, and started a deluge of heady thoughts while I read. To start, what was the seed of this idea? What came about first?

This story started with the title. It was just a phrase that popped into my head one day and became a brain worm of sorts. I had no story, no character, and no setting for it, but those two words felt like they had a lot of potential. It was also around this time that my mom was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, and her condition made apparent to me the connection between our memories and how they coalesce to create who we are. Anything affecting these memories fundamentally alters the self, however the “self” might be conceived. It was several months later the other story elements emerged, and “The Memory Plague” started to come together. Then it took me four years to write it. Literally, four years. I’ve never struggled so hard with a story.

“The Memory Plague” deals heavily with the concept of what constitutes a “self,” and approaches the question from several angles. Have you encountered any other works (fiction, non-fiction, scientific studies, other art or media) that deal with these concepts that you would recommend?

While I am sure there are a great number of stories and books written on the topic, it’s not a field I have delved into all that much. This story was born from personal experience.

Given that alien memories infected this creature, causing its endless cycle of rebirth, (re)memory, and (re)death, the title works well. But I’m curious, why did you choose to call it a “plague?”

“The Memory Plague” is told from the perspective of an alien that shares collective experiences among its brethren—a classic “hive” mind species—and the presence of the human’s memories intermixed into their own has caused them to be exiled from the rest of their species, the ultimate quarantine, in a sense. If Audu-Omi-Rhu-Ba had been allowed to return to their ship, the human memories would have been transferred to the entire alien species through their shared consciousness, which from the perspective of the alien species would have led to the destruction of their entire civilization. From the alien perspective, this is a plague.

Is there any special significance to the names or physical designations of each component of Audu-Omi-Rhu-Ba?

I know this is probably a disappointing answer, but there is no significance to the names. For me the names were all about the right feel, and when strung together I wanted something with a slightly sing-song quality to it, while still sounding alien. Finally, it was important to me that all of the names be distinctive from each other because each of the forms are distinctive facets of the whole creature. The roles, however, are significant, and were intended to mirror what I thought were important facets of the human self: the primeval fears and instincts (Audu), curiosity (Omi), aggression (Rhu), and reasoned intellect (Ba).

What else are you working on? How has the pandemic affected your writing?

For the past few years, I’ve been working on a series of novels, the Calypto Cycle, and finishing “The Memory Plague” was my first foray back into short fiction in some time. I have since finished almost two more novels in my book series and about a half dozen other short stories. As for the pandemic, my family has been able to weather it fairly well (for now), although it has led to some of the darkest fiction I’ve ever written. Ironically, “The Memory Plague” is not a product of these times, but certainly seems to be fitting reading for them.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER

Elan Samuel grew up traveling between southern California and Israel. He now lives in Oakland with his partner and their three cats, and works as a writer and editor. He is currently pursuing an M.F.A. in creative writing at Western Colorado University. Find him on Twitter at @bonbonelan.

Author Spotlight: P H Lee

Setsu Uzumé | 1402 words

We’re back with “Frost’s Boy,” as promised during the time of “Ann-of-Rags.” What inspired you to write it? Is it part of Tales From the Great Sweet Sea?

The basic inspiration for “Frost’s Boy” comes from two things. The first is the permafrost layer, and the way that in sub-arctic cultures it affects everything, most notably agriculture, and just further thinking about what it means symbolically and mythically. The second is bad boy romances. At the time that I wrote the story fifteen years ago, our culture was at the height of one of our regularly occurring moral panics around bad boy romances. The theory is that if women are permitted to have sexual fantasies about tortured and angry men, somehow these fantasies will directly cause sexual and interpersonal violence. So I wanted to write a bad boy romance as a way of standing up for myself and my friends who love bad boy romance stories.

Because I am the sort of person who likes to ground modern narratives in folklore, when I think of bad boy romances, I think of magical fiancé stories like Beauty and the Beast or The Lindworm Prince. The core story is very similar: there is a monster, who is in fact a cursed prince, and a young girl suffers through his monstrosity to break the curse, guided by the purity of her love or the advice of a magically-aware older woman or both.

“Frost’s Boy” is definitely part of Tales From the Great Sweet Sea. You can see in little pieces of the stories that they’re part of the same folkloric set, although in “Ann-of-Rags,” Bone Grandmother is mostly just a wicked witch, whereas in “Frost’s Boy,” Frost and Winter and Bone are invoked as much more primal, elemental things, something along the lines of deities or at least powerful nature spirits. We can probably infer from this that “Frost’s Boy” is an older part of the tradition, or perhaps that it is told in a more isolated area where they have not yet reduced their traditional divinities to witches and fairies.

There are a number of nods to the real world and its unloveliness at the edges of the main narrative, such as the many possible fates of the couples. How do you see the voice behind these asides? Is it meant to be musing and curious, or more cynical and in keeping with the cruelty of frost?

Unfortunately, Dusty Boots, the narrator of these stories, is extremely coy about his motivations. As an accomplished Talespinner, he is excellent at masking his opinions and motivations, even from his author. So I can’t rightly say why he chose to end the story the way he does. You would have to ask him yourself, although I would not expect a straight answer.

That said, I don’t suppose that there’s any harm in some speculation. Dusty Boots is (as he notes in the beginning of each story) sworn to the truth. Whatever that means for him specifically, it clearly presents a difficulty with “happily ever after” endings. Were they really happy? Forever? I think by telling the ending the way he does, he gets to have it both ways: revealing the truth that marriages to cruel men are often quite unhappy while at the same time truly telling the story just as it was told to him.

You mentioned in our last discussion that there are accepted interpretations of fairy tales, and that you extrapolate very different material. Which lessons from which stories seem most relevant for surviving our current times?

“Frost’s Boy” has a more straightforward moral, I think, although it is double-barreled, mirroring the ending, with the happy moral and the terrifying moral. The happy moral is that if you want to save a monster from himself, you must ground him in the human and the humane. When evil people are reformed, it is rarely through high-minded ideology but instead through basic human kindness, reciprocity, and accountability. This is boring work, and dangerous, and hard, and it is of course wildly unfair (why should someone be kind to an evil person, who is by definition undeserving of kindness?).

You see this lesson throughout the magical fiancé stories: the curse is broken and the prince redeemed through insistence of cultural custom, enforcing personal boundaries, and extending genuine love. I think that the modern versions of this story have often lost the first two parts of this equation, which reduces them to paeans about “the power of love.” This is made worse because love is often, in modern media definition, the absence of personal boundaries. No wonder we’re quite uncomfortable with these stories now!

There is then, of course, the terrifying moral: Most evil people are not reformed. Most evil people remain evil, and continue doing evil, and extending them basic human kindness, reciprocity, and accountability does nothing but put you and your family at risk. No amount of insisting on cultural custom and enforcing boundaries will save you from a husband who thinks it’d be fun to murder you. The only solution there is to meet force with force, and often that is not enough.

If you had to choose an artist or musician to accompany your work, who would you choose? Either for this story, or for the Sweet Sea series. Feel free to expand past illustration and into textiles or sculpture if that feels like a more natural fit—I’m curious how your work might translate to other media.

The fairy tale books of my childhood were lavishly illustrated by Arthur Rackham and Trina Schart Hyman, so of course theirs are the images that run through my mind when I write these fairy tales.

As a fairy tale reader, I expected one ending, but as a modern reader, I expected another. Somehow you delivered both. Was that part of the first draft(s), or was it something you shaped later in revisions?

Magical fiancé stories were particularly useful for the time and place where they originated, when divorce was rare-to-impossible and you might very well end up married to a monster and need to figure out how to survive that situation. Of course, our current society views love and marriage quite differently, and thank God for no-fault divorce and the raft of other laws that have made our marriages happier and safer.

Of course, that’s where we run into the trouble with Beauty and the Beast and similar stories in a modern context—why not just leave? Different retellers have resolved this tension in different ways (Disney, famously, by introducing a new male character simply to be even worse than the Beast and make him look good by comparison.)

For “Frost’s Boy,” I always knew that there needed to be an ending with “happily ever after” and also there needed to be enough evidence for the reader to understand that the “happily ever after” was quite likely a lie.

Originally I tried to handle this with a frame story which added 3,000 useless words and didn’t even get the point across. When I couldn’t find a way out of that, I trunked the story indefinitely. This particular ending, with the repeated “I am told” refrain, was literally the last thing I wrote in this story, nearly fifteen years after the rest of it. But it is an ending that I could not have written fifteen years ago. Sometimes, the only solution to revision problems is to wait until you are a better writer.

What are you reading these days?

I have just started The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell as well as Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir. I’m in the middle of Floating Worlds by Cecelia Holland—a fascinating science fiction novel by an author who normally writes historical fiction, portraying (among many other things) a non-utopian anarchist society.

I just finished Yoon Ha Lee’s excellent new novel Phoenix Extravagant in a single night. I do not often shell out for hardcovers but for Yoon of course I made an exception and did not regret it.

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.

Coming Attractions

The Editors | 204 words

Coming up in February, in Lightspeed . . .

We have original science fiction by Phoebe Barton (“The Mathematics of Fairyland”) and writing duo Keith Brooke and Eric Brown (“Me Two”), along with SF reprints by Paul Crenshaw (“Bulletproof Tattoos”) and Maureen F. McHugh (“Sidewalks”).

Plus, we have original fantasy by A.T. Greenblatt (“The Memory of a Memory is a Spirit”) and Alexander Weinstein (“Destinations of Beauty”), and fantasy reprints by Micah Dean Hicks (“Church of Birds”) and Carrie Vaughn (“Dead Men in Central City”).

All that, and of course we also have our usual assortment of author spotlights and book reviews, and our ebook readers will enjoy 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: P H Lee, Ashok K. Banker, Adam-Troy Castro, An Owomoyela, and Claire Wrenwood.

So be sure to keep an eye out for all that SFnal goodness in the months to come. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Lightspeed.

Thanks for reading!

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Subscriptions: If you enjoy reading Lightspeed, please consider subscribing. It’s a great way to support the magazine, and you’ll get your issues in the convenient ebook format of your choice. All purchases from the Lightspeed store are provided in epub, mobi, and pdf format. A 12-month subscription to Lightspeed includes 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!

Visit lightspeedmagazine.com/subscribe for more information, including about third-party subscription options.

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 (recently revived, other) 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 How to Become a Dragonrider or Space Wizard

The Editors

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 Patreon (patreon.com/JohnJosephAdams).

TL;DR Version

If you enjoy Fantasy, Nightmare, and/or Lightspeed, our Patreon page is 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?

There are no big companies supporting or funding our magazines, so they 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 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 Fantasy, Nightmare, and Lightspeed are separate entities, we decided to create a single “publisher” Patreon account because it seemed like it would be more efficient to manage just one account.

Basically, we wanted to create a crowdfunding page where, if you enjoy the work Adamant Press puts out, and you want to contribute a little something to help make it easier for us to produce more cool projects, then our Patreon is the place to do that.

What Do I Get Out of Being a 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, you help fund our growth and continued publication of three 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. That URL again is patreon.com/JohnJosephAdams.

Thanks in advance for your time. We look forward to hopefully being able to make the magazines—and our 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/Senior Editor

Wendy N. Wagner

Associate Editor & Book Reviewer

Arley Sorg

Reprint Editor

Rich Horton

Podcast Producer

Stefan Rudnicki

Podcast Editor/Host

Jim Freund

Art Director

John Joseph Adams

Assistant Editor

Laurel Amberdine

Editorial Assistant

Alex Puncekar

Reviewers

Arley Sorg

LaShawn Wanak

Chris Kluwe

Carrie Vaughn

Christopher East

Violet Allen

Interviewer

Christian A. Coleman

Copy Editor

Dana Watson

Proofreaders

Anthony R. Cardno

Devin Marcus

Webmaster

Jeremiah Tolbert of Clockpunk Studios

Associate Publisher/Director of Special Projects

Christie Yant

Assistant Publisher

Robert Barton Bland

Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

The Editors

If you enjoy reading our Adamant Press magazines, you might also enjoy these works edited by our publisher 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)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019 (with Carmen Maria Machado)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2020 (with Diana Gabaldon)

Brave New Worlds

By Blood We Live

Cosmic Powers

Dead Man’s Hand

THE DYSTOPIA TRIPTYCH, Vol. 1: Ignorance is Strength (with Hugh Howey and Christie Yant)

THE DYSTOPIA TRIPTYCH, Vol. 2: Burn the Ashes (with Hugh Howey and Christie Yant)

THE DYSTOPIA TRIPTYCH, Vol. 3: Or Else the Light (with Hugh Howey and Christie Yant)

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

The Way of the Wizard

What the #@&% is That? (with Douglas Cohen)

NOVELS and COLLECTIONS

Beacon 23 by Hugh Howey

Wool by Hugh Howey

Shift by Hugh Howey

Dust by Hugh Howey

The Silo Saga Omnibus 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

Reentry by Peter Cawdron

Half Way Home by Hugh Howey

Chosen Ones by Veronica Roth

Creatures of Charm and Hunger by Molly Tanzer

The Unfinished Land by Greg Bear [forthcoming]

A Dark Queen Rises by Ashok K. Banker [forthcoming]

The Conductors by Nicole Glover [forthcoming]

The Apocalypse Seven by Gene Doucette [forthcoming]

Visit johnjosephadams.com to learn more about all of the above.